Nurturing Infrastructures of Care: Centering Healing, Imagination and Solidarity in Polycrisis Response, with Chiara Camponeschi

A co-sponsored event between the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research and the CITY Institute.

Despite being relatively recent terms, narratives of poly- and permacrisis seem to have saturated public discourse, becoming a frequently invoked justification for policies of austerity and enclosure that often translate into experiences of isolation, vulnerability and "chronic urban trauma" (Pain, 2019) for many people on the ground. Rather than succumbing to a passive acceptance of crisis as inevitable and predetermined, a growing number of frontline communities is resisting, reworking and actively reimagining alternatives to the status quo along distinctly 'integrative' (Camponeschi, 2021), 'care-full' (Williams, 2020; Sultana, 2022) and relational lines.

This seminar will provide an overview of preliminary work from the Turning Moments of Crisis into Moments of Care project, which aims to subversively reclaim public imaginaries of crisis response through the concept of‘infrastructures of care’––a suite of scalable approaches and solutions that ensure that as a society we are not merely surviving a disruption but are committing to interventions that place equity, solidarity and care at the center of healthy adaptation and sustainable change.

Speaker Profile

Chiara Camponeschi is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at York University's Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research. As an interdisciplinary researcher, her work is situated at the intersections of climate justice, urban resilience and planetary health. She has published on these topics in journals such as Geoforum, Cities and Health, and Nature Sustainability.

Chiara is also the founder of Enabling City, an action-research organization devoted to stimulating new imaginaries for transformative social change, and has two decades of experience working in nonprofit and civil society spaces around the world as an advisor, educator, and consultant on issues pertaining to urban sustainability, just transitions, solidarity economies and more.

Join us on Friday, November 7, at 10 a.m. ET

RSVP here: