About

Stable Gestures is a collaborative platform that brings together artistic praxis, ethical analysis and scientific research in an interdisciplinary setting to investigate contemporary systems of care, health and archiving; it seeks to offer speculative, pluralist responses to (de)stabilise the aesthetic-ethical value dualisms and tensions, visible and invisible, that characterise dominant practices in health, care and beyond.

Departing reflexively using care ethics as both a method and theory, Stable Gestures focuses on different sites of inquiry—body/data, familial/personal, structure/gesture—to explore who or what things we look after, what kind of relations develop, what types of body and memories matter and are remembered.

By considering, among other things, how technologically-mediated interfaces increasingly affect what we care for, the power and beauty of non-judgemental caring relations, and the ethical-politics of contemporary caring aesthetics, Stable Gestures seeks to create a multicultural space where carelessness and the need for healing are explored, through both momentary gestures and stable acts.

In adopting and seeking to expand visions of care, Stable Gestures prioritises multidisciplinary approaches whilst recognizing the centrality of the work by feminist thinkers and activists since the 1980s and earlier, as well as the importance of care practices to minoritized and marginalized communities, alongside the evolving historicity and polyvocality of care as a category of analysis and tool of liberation/oppression.

Stable Gestures is situated within a context of existing Oxford-based initiatives exploring care as theory and methodology, notably the Hub on Global Experiences of Gender in an Age of Care Crises and Transformation, whose researchers explore how gendered inequalities underpin crises in care. Find out more at: https://gendercarehub.site.ox.ac.uk/home.

BACKGROUND

Stable Gestures emerges from the shared interests of the contributors in cross-cultural care practices, memory, health, technology and community, with expertise across medical ethics, jainist philosophy, population health, visual art and data governance.

Vincent Straub’s postantitinterransdisciplinary practice is broadly concerned with understanding how human health, systems of care, computational tools, and relational norms interact, affect how we behave and influence our emotions, and the effects it has on our collective well-being. He is also interested in the limits of expression, the role of the body today, and catalysing political and social change.

This dialogue is extended through collaboration with Deshna Shah, whose research and artistic practices explore language, symbolic scripts, ancestral archive, and the politics of memory. Deshna’s Twilight Language, a script drawn from Hindi, English, and Gujarati, serves as a core motif for encoding and decoding memory, emotion, and identity. Interested by the overlaps between Jain philosophy and quantum physics, her work investigates unseen forces shaping human experience.

Further expertise is provided through Mehrunisha Suleman’s work in global bioethics and clinical ethics, which has focused on how health systems often fall short for racial and ethnic minority communities, particularly due to misaligned epistemic and cultural assumptions.

SUPPORT

Stable Gestures is supported by the ANTITHESES Wellcome Discovery Platform Arts, Health and Ethics Fund, the Cultural Programme at the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities and the St Edmund Hall Culture Fund.

IMPRESSUM

Website design: Vincent Straub

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