Center for Care Initiative: Lead Organizers

Professor Christine Garlough

Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, Garlough’s research constellates around issues of political communication, feminist philosophy, and social activism through public performance. Her work on feminist ethics of care and the political potential of acknowledgment has been published in journals like Quarterly Journal of Speech, Women Studies in Communication, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and Journal of American Folklore. Her book, Desi Divas: Activism and Acknowledgment in Diasporic Performances (2013), will be followed by a second, titled Feminist Ethics of Care: Folk Performance and Politics in an Age of Neopopulism, currently under contract with Indiana University Press. She teaches courses such as “Feminist Politics of Care” and “Women, Culture and Grassroots Politics” and works primarily with grassroots feminist activists in India and the U.S. who re-envision vernacular culture for political purposes and create caring contexts for social change.

Assistant Professor Annie Menzel

Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and former midwife, Menzel’s research focuses on race, gender, and reproductive politics in North America. A political theorist with emphases on reproductive justice, Black political thought, Black feminisms, feminist political theory, queer theory, and biopolitics, her work brings these literatures to bear on the histories and current shape of health and medicine. Her work is published or forthcoming in journals including Political Theory, the Du Bois Review, and Signs. She is completing revisions on her first book, The Political Life of Black Infant Mortality, under contract with the University of California Press, and has begun research on her second book, Birthing Paradox: Race, Colonization, and Radicalism in US Midwifery.

Professor Michael Peterson

Professor of Art and Director of the graduate program in Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies, Peterson is co-founder of the arts collaborative Spatula&Barcode, which is centrally concerned with themes of hospitality and conviviality, and co-edited a recent issue of the journal Performance Research on the theme “On Generosity.” He teaches a First-year Interest Group course titled “How to Live: Art, Ethics, and the Everyday.”

Assistant Professor James McMaster

Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies. He is currently working on a book project that puts the discourse of care theory into conversation with queer, feminist, and Asian Americanist critique and cultural production. His writing has appeared, or will soon, in the Journal of Asian American Studies, American Quarterly, TDR/The Drama Review, Transgender Studies Quarterly, and Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory where he is also the co-editor of a special issue titled The Between: Couple Forms, Performing Together with Olivia Michiko Gagnon. He completed his PhD in the department of Performance Studies at NYU.

Professor Beatriz L. Botero

Professor of Comparative Literature and Folklore Studies, Botero is a specialist in contemporary Latin American literature and cultural studies. Her research is oriented primarily towards topics in poetics, trauma, and psychoanalysis with special emphasis on identity, body and social conflict. That is present in her book Women in Contemporary Latin American Novels. Psychoanalysis and Gendered Violence.

Tia Murray

PhD student in Human Ecology, doula, and longtime community organizer, Murray’s research explores the root causes of residual impacts of racial inequities in maternal and child health, and black infant mortality in particular, using a reproductive justice framework and community-based participatory research. She is also interested in furthering research on the benefits of doulas on perinatal health outcomes in communities of color. She feels it imperative to reframe our language and research in respect to racial health disparities.

Esaí Ortiz-Rivera

Esaí Ortiz-Rivera is a Masters student in the department of Gender and Women Studies. Their research analyzes queer anticolonial performances in the 2019 summer protests in Puerto Rico through the lens of performance studies in conversation with queer theory, affect theory, critical race theory, and decolonial political theory. They focus on the ways music and dance enable the subject to embody an affective agency to collectively create coalitional movements and politics. They are interested in the ways care provides a space for sociopolitical transformation in conversation with everyday performances, activism, embodiments, and cultural productions.

Jimmy Taitano Camacho

Jimmy Taitano Camacho is a Chamoru from Guåhan (Guam) and PhD Candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His work examines how Indigenous peoples across Oceania are enacting distinct property institutions to regenerate political and cultural foundations, as a means to obtain political sovereignty and survive.

Stepha Velednitsky

Stepha Velednitsky is a PhD student in the Department of Geography. In her fieldwork, she has been collaborating with a workers’ rights organization supporting migrant caregivers in Israel/Palestine. This research allows Stepha to explore how economies of social reproduction reproduce the differential embodiment of migrant workers, structuring citizen and non-citizen disabilities.