Who Cares? Stories of Uncertainty and the Work of Care

Two-Day Symposium | 19 and 20 November 2026 | Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Organised by: Michelle Chiang

Care is often imagined as a moral good, a professional duty, or a selfless act. Yet care is also work: interpretive, embodied, relational, and unevenly distributed. It often takes place under conditions of uncertainty, when needs are difficult to read, responsibilities are shared or contested, resources are limited, and outcomes remain unclear.

Who Cares? Stories of Uncertainty and the Work of Care asks how stories shape the ways care is recognised, practised, distributed, and valued. It explores what close attention to stories, images, testimony, memory, and lived experience can reveal about care when human experience is difficult to interpret, responsibility is hard to locate, and needs remain unseen, contested, or unresolved.

For this symposium, “stories” refers to personal accounts as well as literary, visual, historical, philosophical, testimonial, life-writing, arts-based, and community-engaged forms of meaning-making. We welcome proposals that examine how care is represented, remembered, interpreted, valued, and contested through stories, images, testimony, memory, imagination, and lived experience.

Possible topics:

• Illness, dependency, and care, including illness narratives, caregiver stories, life writing, testimony, memory, and the limits of knowing another person’s experience.
• Care responsibility, including how accounts of care assign, obscure, distribute, or contest responsibility across families, institutions, professions, communities, and public life.
• Embodied lives and care relations, including ageing, disability, pain, grief, palliative care, end-of-life care, and the ways people make sense of changing needs, dependencies, and forms of support.
• Unequal visibility of care, including how literary, visual, artistic, clinical, and community accounts make care visible, overlook it, romanticise it, misrecognise it, or take it for granted.
• Care, technology, and the future, including how AI, digital health, data and emerging technologies reshape stories of care, responsibility, judgement, human presence, and the meaning of good care

The symposium will include keynote lectures, themed panels, and sustained interdisciplinary discussion. We especially welcome contributions that place humanities methods in dialogue with lived experience, healthcare practice, education, community engagement, public culture, and/or policy.

Submission Guidelines

• Individual paper proposals should include a title, an abstract of 250 to 300 words, and a short biography of no more than 100 words.
• Panel proposals should include a panel title, a 300-word panel rationale, individual paper abstracts of 250 to 300 words, and short biographies for all speakers.
• Roundtable, workshop, and creative or practice-based proposals should include a title, a 300-word description of the proposed session, the intended format, the names and short biographies of all contributors, and any technical or spatial requirements.

 Please include the following in your submission:

• Name and institutional affiliation
• Email address
• Presentation or session title
• Abstract or session description
• Short biography
• Preferred format: paper, panel, roundtable, workshop, or creative/practice-based contribution

Hospitality and Participation

Lunch and dinner will be provided for registered participants on both symposium days. Details on registration, venue, and programme arrangements will be circulated after acceptance notifications.

Key Dates

Symposium Aim

By bringing together humanities scholars, educators, artists, caregivers, and community partners, Who Cares? Stories of Uncertainty and the Work of Care seeks to create a focused space for thinking carefully about how stories shape care when knowledge is incomplete, responsibility is shared, and human experience exceeds easy resolution.

The organisers may explore possibilities for selected papers to be developed for a future publication, subject to programme fit and editorial planning.