TP 5: Infrastructures of care. Sounds, social editing and cuidadanía

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Isabell Lorey
• Subject Area: Practical Philosophy
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 524611401

The concept of "cuidadanía" as a citizenship of care, which emerged in queer-feminist discourses and social movements in Spain in the 2000s, serves as a framework for TP 5. Although the democracy movements at the beginning of the 2010s referred to "cuidadanía", the concept is only roughly outlined. How a "cuidadanía" can be systematically imagined and realized in institutional and infrastructural terms remains a gap that TP 5 aims to fill with concrete and philosophical proposals. To do this, it does not have to invent anything completely new, but rather recognize existing practices and bring them into resonance with one another, above all by remembering and actualizing forgotten practices. With a philosophical-conceptual perspective and at the same time a strong practical orientation, the TP examines microstructures and practices that support, expand and replace public supply/care infrastructures in various ways through the interconnectedness of people, things and environments in order to expand the imaginative space for new possibilities of participation. The TP focuses on Spain and investigates historical infrastructures of care in psychiatric institutions from the 1920s to the 1950s, as well as recalcitrant care infrastructures in neighborhoods of Málaga and near Barcelona that are currently emerging between a politically active society and the dismantled and rebuilt welfare state infrastructures; it experiments with aesthetic practices of sound and editing that are involved in care infrastructures in different ways. It also explores concrete geopolitical resonances in France, Algeria and Brazil. The framework project VAGABONDING CARE (TP leader) will analyze and update forgotten psychiatric care infrastructures in the environment of the Catalan-French psychiatrist François Tosquelles (1912-1994) from the first half of the 20th century. In the associated therapeutic understanding, care is understood as moving and vagabonding and can be conceptualized theoretically not only as an infrastructural but also as an instituent practice. The first sub-project SOCIAL EDITING focuses on current health policy care infrastructures and self-organized neighborhood support networks, especially in the Gornal neighborhood in L'Hospitalet near Barcelona, where it is involved in situated research, especially in the production of editorial objects. Similarly, the second sub-project SONIC MATTERING concentrates on the Lagunillas neighborhood in Málaga against the backdrop of touristification. It examines the self-organized neighborhood care infrastructures there as well as the role that sound plays in the production, encounter and memory of various forms of infrastructural socio-spatial compositions of care.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5710: Infrastructure: Aesthetics and Supply