Care without family? From nuclear myth to collective practice
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| free admission |
| English, German |
| Mechanical Arena in the Foyer |
| Belongs to: Care or Chaos? |
This panel explores care beyond the boundaries of the traditional nuclear family. In dialogue, the speakers reveal different understandings of “caring for one another”: while Sophie Lewis critically examines whether the rhetoric of family inevitably perpetuates capitalist and patriarchal structures, Ge Wang introduces Daoist and Buddhist perspectives that inspire alternative, post-familial models.
At the heart of the discussion are the ethical and practical dimensions of social care: how might it be shaped as an extension of familial roles, or through entirely new collective structures? The conversation also highlights human vulnerability and mutual dependence – from children and those in need of care to the everyday relations that bind us together.
Dr Sophie Lewis is an independent scholar and writer based in Philadelphia. For the last five years, she has held a visiting affiliation at the University of Pennsylvania; before that, she studied English Literature, followed by a Masters in Environmental Policy, at Oxford University, and she received her PhD from the the University of Manchester following a Fulbright scholarship at the New School. Lewis is currently working on a book for Penguin: The Liberation of Children (forthcoming 2027) as well as an essay collection for Haymarket: Femmephilia (forthcoming 2026). She is the author of Full Surrogacy Now (Verso, 2019), Abolish the Family (Verso, 2022), and Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation (Haymarket, 2025). Lewis teaches short courses online for the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and publishes essays everywhere from the London Review of Books to Hanser Verlag’s Selber Schuld anthology.
Dr. Ge Wang is a philosopher and translator. After academic appointments at Peking University and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, she currently researches and teaches at the Institute of Philosophy, Freie Universität Berlin. Her work engages with German Idealism, Early German Romanticism, ethics of motherhood, and contemporary Chinese philosophy. She leads the Center for Chinese Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin and is committed to fostering philosophical dialogue across diverse cultural traditions.
Susanne Lettow teaches philosophy and gender studies and works at the Margherita-von-Brentano Centre for Gender Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. She works on classical German philosophy, critical theory and feminist philosophy with a focus on the history and politics of the concept of reproduction. Currently, she is leading (together with Stefanie Graefe) the interdisciplinary research project on Dynamics of the reproductive economy. Forms of appropriation in global fertility chains. Publications include: Dimensions of Property in Reproductive Economies (ed. with S. Graefe and I. Herb, 2025), “Hegel and the Political Economy of the Family” (Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 44, 2023), and Reproduction, Race, and Gender in Philosophy and the Early Life Sciences (ed., 2014).
Three panels open up different yet interconnected perspectives on the theme of care: from child and youth welfare, to elder care, to post-familial, collective practices. Together, they show that care is a responsibility for society as a whole – one that calls for institutional reform, new social models, and a critical reflection on family images.