Conference Agenda

This symposium brings together three empirical and conceptual contributions that explore how feminist care ethics reconfigures processes of knowing and acting in organizational life. Responding to the NW32 call, the symposium examines care ethics as an onto‑epistemological shift—a reorientation of how organizational actors perceive, interpret, and respond to uncertainty, disruption, and relational complexity. Rather than treating care as a moral add‑on to organizational practice, the symposium positions care as a way of knowing and a mode of action that reshapes the conditions under which learning, judgment, and democratic engagement become possible.

The symposium is grounded in the field of Organizational Education (Organisationspädagogik), which conceptualizes learning as occurring within, by, and between organizations (Göhlich et al., 2018). From this perspective, knowing and acting are not separate domains but mutually constitutive processes shaped by relational, cultural, and material conditions. Care ethics deepens this understanding by foregrounding attentiveness, responsiveness, relational responsibility, and embodied experience as central to how organizational actors navigate uncertainty (Hamington, 2011; Møller, 2025; Tronto, 1993; Tronto, 2013). In doing so, the symposium contributes to current efforts within Organizational Education to clarify its theoretical positioning, interdisciplinary foundations, and methodological orientations.

The NW32 call highlights the need to rethink knowing and acting in light of shifting organizational conditions, including tacit and explicit knowing, theories‑in‑use, co‑creation, epistemic justice, and the knowing–doing gap. Care ethics offers a distinctive contribution to these debates by challenging dominant assumptions about knowledge as something that precedes action or exists independently of relational and affective contexts. Instead, care ethics conceptualizes knowing as situated, embodied, and co‑created—emerging through encounters with vulnerability, interdependence, and the ethical demands of shared life. This perspective resonates with practice‑theoretical approaches to knowledge‑in‑action, but extends them by emphasizing the ethical, affective, and relational dimensions of organizational life.

The symposium also responds to contemporary challenges that unsettle established ways of knowing and acting in organizations. In times of polycrisis—marked by social fragmentation, ecological instability, and political polarization—organizations increasingly face situations where established routines, knowledge bases, and decision‑making frameworks fall short. Care ethics offers a framework for navigating such conditions by cultivating relational sensitivity, ethical imagination, and collective responsibility. It invites organizational actors to engage with uncertainty not as a problem to be eliminated, but as a generative space for inquiry, democratic becoming, and shared sense‑making (Miller, 2020; Moriggi et al., 2020; Simpson & de Hond, 2022).

Across three presentations, care ethics is explored through different empirical and conceptual entry points, including aesthetic and embodied learning, productive disruption, and post‑action emotional processes. While the presentations draw on diverse materials—including work from the AECED project on aesthetic and embodied learning for democracy—they converge around a shared question: How does a care‑ethical perspective transform what it means to know and act in organizational settings marked by uncertainty?

By bringing these perspectives into dialogue, the symposium demonstrates how feminist care ethics enriches Organizational Education by offering new ways to conceptualize and practice knowing and acting in organizations. It shows how care ethics can illuminate the relational, embodied, and ethical dimensions of organizational learning; how it can challenge neoliberal and technocratic assumptions about knowledge; and how it can support democratic, inclusive, and responsive forms of organizing.

The symposium argues that care ethics is not a soft or peripheral concern but a foundational onto‑epistemological orientation for learning in uncertain times. It invites symposium participants to consider how caring engagements—with people, situations, materials, and uncertainties—can open new possibilities for organizational learning, ethical action, and democratic participation.

In an era of polycrisis and uncertainty, the relationship between "knowing" and "acting" is often fragmented by neoliberal rationalities that prioritise efficiency over relationality. This paper proposes a fundamental onto-ethico-political shift: moving from the logic of "caring-for" toward a practice of "caring-with". This shift is grounded in Barad’s (2007, 2012) onto-ethico-epistemology, which emphasises the inseparability of knowing, being, and doing. By approaching care and organising not as distinct spheres but as co-constituted processes, I orient organisational learning as a site of "world-making", that is, a continuous process of making and unmaking shared life. Rather than seeking a synthesis of theories, this worldly and caring practice traces patterns of interference between care, organising, and democracy. This approach allows for a critique of the modern educational episteme, which Ball and Collet-Sabé (2022, 2024) argue isolates learners into competitive, individual subjects (homo oeconomicus). To bridge the knowing–doing gap, I move toward Tronto’s (2017) homines curans (caring people), where learning is an ethical and embodied practice of response-ability (Haraway, 2016). I operationalise this shift through five conceptual orientations that reconfigure the textures of organisational knowing and acting. Specifically, I draw on vulnerability and interdependence (Butler, 2004; Tronto, 2013) to recognise shared ontological exposure as the ground of politics. This is extended through more-than-human relationality (Haraway, 2016; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017), moving care beyond human-centred frameworks. Furthermore, I engage with pluralism and agonism (Mouffe, 2000; Cloyes, 2002) to argue for holding the discomfort of difference, while staying attentive to intersectional justice (Collins, 2000; Fraser, 2016) to transform the asymmetries of the social, cultural, and material world. Finally, through openness and embeddedness (Derrida, 2005; Deleuze, 1994), I suggest that organising stays responsive to the "worlding democracy" within the immanent present. By centring these five orientations within the homines curans rationale, this paper demonstrates that knowing and acting are no longer separate domains but emerge through relational encounters. These orientations do not merely suggest a new strategy; they provide the material and ethical textures for a feminist care ethics perspective toward organisational learning for democracy. By bridging situated knowledge with response-ability, this shift transforms organisational learning inquiry from a technocratic practice into a generative space for democratic becoming. Finally, I propose that 'worlding democracy' is enacted through these ongoing practices of caring-with, offering a new grammar for living and organising in times of uncertainty.

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2012). On touching—the inhuman that therefore I am. Differences, 23(3), 206–223. Cloyes, K. G. (2002). Agonizing care: Care ethics, agonistic feminism, and a political theory of care. Nursing Inquiry, 9(3), 203–214. Collins, P. H. (2000). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment (2nd ed.). Routledge. Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition (P. Patton, Trans.). Columbia University Press. Derrida, J. (2005). Rogues: Two essays on reason (P.-A. Brault & M. Naas, Trans.). Stanford University Press. Fraser, N. (2016). Contradictions of capital and care. New Left Review, 100, 99–117. Haraway, D. J. (2016). Sympoiesis: Symbiotic entities and the politics of worlding. In Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene (pp. 58–98). Duke University Press. Mouffe, C. (2000). Deliberative democracy or agonistic pluralism? (Political Science Series, 1–16). Institute for Advanced Studies. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Tronto, J. (2017). There is an alternative: Homines curans and the limits of neoliberalism. International Journal of Care and Caring, 1(1), 27–43.

Contemporary organizational and educational landscapes are marked by democratic erosion, socio political polarization, and accelerating societal transformations. Dominant paradigms often respond by minimizing uncertainty and reinforcing established norms. This paper challenges such stabilizing tendencies by arguing that experiences of disruption and confusion can serve as generative sites for critical reflection, dialogical engagement, and transformative learning (Ahmed 2010; Biesta 2013). Drawing on queer pedagogical accounts of productive disruption (Britzman 1995; Luhmann 1998; Juvonen 2006), it explores how encounters with ambiguity can support aesthetic, embodied, and relational forms of learning oriented toward democratic practice, particularly in higher education. Building on scholarship that positions disruption as a catalyst for epistemic innovation, the paper reframes confusion not as a deficit but as a generative force that unsettles habitual ways of knowing and acting. Moments of disorientation invite participants to collectively re imagine organizational possibilities and question dominant assumptions about order, coherence, and expertise. Using classroom interventions from the AECED project, the paper examines organizational education as a site where such disruptions become relationally and corporeally charged encounters. When learners confront ambiguity, vulnerability, or epistemic friction, the need for care becomes pronounced. Care ethics, articulated by Tronto (1993, 2013) and Puig de la Bellacasa (2017), understands care as a situated, embodied, and political practice enacted through bodily presence, affective attunement, and material engagement. Care becomes a mode of knowing that emerges through gestures, rhythms, and relational responsiveness. This embodied orientation is crucial in moments of productive disruption, when learners rely not only on cognitive strategies but also on sensory, affective, and corporeal forms of attention. Integrating queer pedagogical insights with care ethical perspectives, the paper argues that uncertainty should be embraced as a generative space for cultivating democratic and relational capacities. Embodied care practices—attentiveness, responsiveness, and relational responsibility—enable learners to inhabit ambiguity without retreating into defensiveness or reproducing dominant power/knowledge hierarchies. Such practices reconfigure knowing and acting as interdependent, situated, and materially grounded processes rather than linear or purely cognitive ones. In a time marked by instability and contested futures, organizational education can become a transformative arena where disruption is met with embodied care and uncertainty becomes a shared resource for collective learning, relational responsibility, and the re imagining of futures. This orientation opens new potentials for organizational education research, inviting explorations of how care infused, embodied, and co creative practices can shape alternative modes of knowing and acting within complex organizational worlds.

Ahmed, S. (2010). The Promise of Happiness. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Biesta, G. (2013). Interrupting the politics of learning. Power and Education, 5(1), 4-15. https://doi.org/10.2304/power.2013.5.1.4. Britzman, D. P. (1995). Is There A QueerPedagogy? Or, Stop Reading Straight. Educational Theory, 45(2), 151–165. Luhmann (1998). Queering/Querying Pedagogy? Or, Pedagogy Is a Pretty Queer Thing. Queer Theory in Education. In W. F. Pinar (Ed.), Queer Theory in. Lawrence Erlbaum/Peter Lang/Routledge. pp. 141-155. Juvonen (2006). Kohti pervopedagogiikka. Lesbo- ja queer -tutkimuksen opettaminen haasteena yliopistopedagogiigalle. Naitutkimuslehti/Kvinnoforskning, 4/2006. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Tronto, J. C. (1993). Tronto, J. (1993). Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (1st ed.). Routledge. Tronto, J. C. (2013). Caring democracy: Markets, equality, and justice. NYU Press.

The widespread sense of disconnection among young Europeans from democratic institutions underscores the urgency of shifting this dynamic through reflective engagement. In this context, organizational education emerges as vital for strengthening intergenerational bonds, addressing youth aspirations for societal inclusion and self-determination, and fostering a forward-looking vision of justice (Council of Europe, 2014; Häggström and Schmidt, 2021). A transformative organizational process thus depends on its capacity to integrate analytical and projective approaches, allowing participants to critically examine the roots of present issues while envisioning actionable alternatives. To this end, Participatory Action Research (PAR) initiatives, such as the CCLAB, offer a structured methodology for collective inquiry rooted in relational and contextual knowledge co-creation. By facilitating shared understanding through dialogue and creative experimentation, this approach marks a clear shift from content-delivery models toward situated, experiential learning environments, thereby reorienting educational paradigms of knowing and acting. This shift is significant as it empirically shows how situated co-creative learning functions as a constitutive element of a wholesome democratic education. Drawing on implementation experiences from the CCLAB model and aligning them with Palka’s (2024) feminist participatory research framework, this communication explores the epistemic, relational, and political tensions that arise when democratic learning processes unfold within formal and non-formal educational institutions, as well as the consequent affective labor required of both facilitators and participants. This affective labor is framed within the concept of invisible work (Daniels, 1987), which in this context refers to relational skills that provide the interpersonal background for collaboration, translation, intercultural adaptation, and the sustainability of the social fabric required in participatory research process. When tensions arise due to complex power dynamics within participatory ecosystems, a care ethics approach entails recognizing the situated constraints of existing infrastructures (Star, 1999; Berlant, 2016) as a preliminary step toward adapting and attuning (Mol, 2008) to the site-specific qualities of the community in which PAR takes place. This paper highlights post‑process reflection from the CCLAB implementation as a metacognitive strategy to examine the emotional aftereffects of participation and how these may influence engagement and the sustainability of participatory action research. It argues that acknowledging the emotional and relational effects of such processes can offer valuable guidance for strengthening co‑creative agency, institutional anchoring, and political reflexivity within PAR. Recognizing emotional and relational labour as knowledge‑producing practices broadens the scope of PAR and establishes these dimensions as fundamental to organizational education research.

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