Reminder: 6 June, Justin Jesty seminar on art, degrowth in Japan now
Olivier Krischer
REMINDER: 6 June online seminar on Japanese art, society and politics
Discussing Degrowth and/as Care Work
Seminar led by Justin Jesty (University of Washington), bio below
Thursday, 6 June 2024 (10:00am - 12:00pm)
In this seminar I would like to discuss the challenge of degrowth culture. Discussions of degrowth tend to focus on economics, with reference to global scales. The question of how degrowth would work at the scale of a local community is less discussed. What would the values, shared meanings, daily or yearly practices of a degrowth community look like? How would people live--and find value in living--in a degrowth society?
I believe that "care" provides one important answer to these questions. Care provides a lens that focuses the experience and practice of value, as well as certain kinds of economic and social activity (as in "care work"). It answers questions that are left out of more abstract degrowth theorizing, like "what will people do all day?" while also addressing aspects of human experience--particularly relating to vulnerability and death--that are abjected in capitalist economic and cultural systems.
Justin Jesty (University of Washington) researches the relationship between art and social movements in postwar Japan. His book Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan (Cornell University Press 2018) was awarded the 2019 ASAP Book Prize by the Association for the Study of Arts of the Present. He is currently researching contemporary socially engaged art in Japan. In 2017 he edited a two-part special issue on the topic in FIELD: A Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism. He has also published several articles on postwar social documentary.
https://washington.academia.edu/JustinJesty
About the organisers:
This event is part of the 2024 Sydney Asian Art Series, co-convened by Olivier Krischer (UNSW) and Yvonne Low (University of Sydney), hosted by the Power Institute, VisAsia and the Art Gallery of NSW.