JANET CHILDERHOSE
Research Assistant Professor, College of Medicine-Division of Internal Medicine
Project Title | The Overdose Stories
The United States is undergoing an overdose emergency. Over 150 people die each day from unintentional consumption of fentanyl and xylazine. Care for people who overdose is often informed by the addiction model of substance use often conjoined with narratives about the current opioid crisis. What these narratives obscure are individual stories of people who have experienced overdose, and what just care means to them. There are many overdose stories. They can help us to imagine forms of care that remedy, beyond current models of substance use prevention and treatment. This project will amplify the voices and recommendations of people who are experts at staying alive in an unsafe environment and include the creation of an installation of overdose stories based on interviews with up to 20 Ohio residents who have experienced a non-fatal drug overdose. Each story will be paired with a photographic portrait. This installation will depict what care—or the absence of care—means to each person. At the heart of this project is a core ethical question that is intentionally provocative. If we value all lives, what care should we develop so that every person in this country is safe from overdose?

NAMIKO KUNIMOTO
Associate Professor, History of Art
Project | Urgent Animations
This project situates Japanese Empire as a world-historical event that continues to exert profound influence over political dynamics and, crucially, the broad set of contemporary art practices that foreground collective care and work toward justice in the extended wake of twentieth-century Japanese militarism. Since Japanese Imperialism was a geographically expansive phenomenon that breached national boundaries and whose impacts have lingered long after 1945, this project approaches art addressing this topic in trans-national and trans-historical ways, revealing the historical stakes of contemporary Transpacific art in Singapore, Canada, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea. This project mobilizes the term “animate” in its most capacious sense: to create apparently lifelike movement, to give life to, to give vigor and zest, or to move to action. To animate history is not just to consider historical context but to create political consciousness that is enlivened through historical interpretation. Through analyses of works by contemporary Transpacific artists, Urgent Animations highlights the lingering present-ness of Japanese Imperialism to press for justice in current-day politics at a time of heightening anti-Asian racism in North America and increasing nationalism in Japan.

ASHLEY HOPE PÉREZ
Assistant Professor, Comparative Studies
Project Title | Sustaining Advocacy for Reader's Rights
This project addresses the harms of book bans—including impacts on creative expression, implications for education, and injury to students. Sustained engagement with the fight for readers’ rights frequently comes at a high cost. Resisting book bans is slow and often isolating work. Those invested in censorship and exclusion excel at creating a toxic, hostile environment for authors, educators, students, and their allies. This project focuses on intentionally weaving an engagement with care into proreader advocacy and social justice work. Practices that cultivate care will help stakeholders prevent burnout, redress isolation, and continue to defend targeted books and the students who need them. This project centers care as a key part of efforts to resist book bans and develop best practices for sustaining advocacy through a culture of care and coordinate existing partnerships across the country as well as engage new supporters in target efforts while weaving in care and connection.

MARGARET PRICE
Associate Professor, English
Project Title | Transformative Access: Building Collective Care in Institutional Spaces
This project investigates when and how acts of care including “transformative access” and “collective accountability” occur in academe through the building of an accessible, publicly available digital archive and co-authored article. Transformative access is a relational process centering race, ethnicity, disability, class, gender, and sexuality. It’s a form of care that specifies access as its focal point and emphasizes coalitional work. Collective accountability, as used here, is a construct that deliberately counters institutions’ tendency to co-opt the terms care or culture of care. In the face of a “mental health crisis” (which is a crisis in lack of structural support), numerous institutions have begun urging their communities to do more work to practice self-care and “outreach to one another” (Ohio State Task Force 2018). Though well meant, this practice amounts to urging already-overworked community members to do even more work (unpaid) to alleviate their own and others’ individual distress. Collective accountability, by contrast, asks how those with more resources can redirect them to shift the responsibility for care from “self” to “institution / policy / structure,” and build knowledge from established community practices of care in ways that are restorative rather than extractive. 

DAVID RUDERMAN
Associate Professor, English (Newark campus)
Project Title | Poetry in the Fields of Poverty and Addiction
The numbers are staggering: 62% of Americans have a family member experiencing addiction; 110,000 drug overdose deaths in 2022. Yet the data suggests that substance use disorder is not just an individual issue but can be linked to other collective and ongoing political, public health, spiritual, and economic crises. This project builds on a poetry-writing project begun as part of the Day Reporting Program in Newark, Ohio. An offshoot of Drug Court, Day Reporting offers people charged with low-level drug offenses the opportunity to participate in a 90-day program in lieu of jail or prison. Participants receive GED training, group therapy, drug and alcohol counseling, parenting classes, and creative arts therapy. This project involves the curation of a collection of poems by and oral histories of people living with and struggling to recover from substance use disorder in Newark, Ohio, and research for a larger book project entitled Literatures of Addiction. Focusing on writers as diverse as Thomas De Quincey, Sara Coleridge, William Burroughs, David Foster Wallace, and Lou Reed, the book explores the links between addiction and political economy and how the trauma, atomization, and alienation inherent in late capitalism compel the hallmarks of addiction. 

JOHANNA SELLMAN
Associate Professor, East Asian Languages and Literature
Project Title | Narratives of Care Across Borders in Contemporary Arabic Literature
This project compares contemporary Arabic literary narratives in migrant and postmigrant settings and how they center the natural environment or other ecologies and systems that offer alternative logics to binary notions of belonging and deservingness (victim/perpetrator, idealization/demonization/ and deserving/non-deserving) seen in many border building practices and discourses. Constructions of an “ideal refugee” deserving of the protections of refuge and citizenship can generate and harden discursive counterparts in notions of others who do not deserve care. This project highlights texts written by women authors that probe the political and social fabric that precede forced migration or are part of its aftermath. In these literary texts, human subjectivities are woven into systems of both care and violence and include positionalities that simultaneously perpetuate and are subject to harm. This project suggests that literary explorations of ecologies and systems invite re-orientation toward how care and justice can be cultivated in creative and generative ways.

LUCILLE TOTH
Assistant Professor, French and Italian
Project | Decolonizing Dance/Movement Therapy
This project examines the limitations of Dance/Movement Therapy (DMT) and advocates for a form of DMT that incorporates intersectional feminist, queer, and anticolonial therapy with decolonial aims. A critical examination of DMT practices shows the gaps between ideals and actual practice (for instance: using verbal communication to anticipate any retraumatizing experience during therapy sessions is an ideal that is impossible to rely on with immigrants who don’t share the same language than the facilitator. Despite extensive literature highlighting the myriad psychological challenges faced by long-term immigrants, there remains a notable gap in DMT literature concerning effective methods and interventions tailored to support this population. This project interrogates the concept and practice of DMT through the lens of decoloniality and proposes a path towards a more global understanding and practice of care through movement. Informed by qualitative engagements with immigrant populations, this project links community care to migration and dance and prompts collective inquiry about decolonial practices within the dance studio. The project will yield two related but separate works: a book chapter that focuses on the mechanics of decolonizing dance and a companion somatic protocol—a step-by-step guideline to facilitate non-verbal, movement-based workshops. 

AMY YOUNGS
Associate Professor, Art
Project Title | Soil Culture Parade
A celebration of soil, enacted by participants in a procession that includes the myriad of ways that soil ecosystems are made, remade, understood, valued, and cared for. This is an inherently entangled and multidisciplinary affair; involving the multitudes of non-human organisms who co-construct the soils that make human lives possible, as well as geological, agricultural, and cultural forces that act upon them. This project makes this complex ecosystem visible through art, costumes, music, and performances activated by people who have participated in workshops and events celebrating soil culture and care. The workshops include the building of Soil Wagon, a sculptural, wheeled structure that houses a living soil ecosystem and requires collaboration with worms, minerals, waste, and a team of human Soil Carers. The care team is composed people who are motivated to practice multiple ways of knowing, including “the arts of attentiveness”, learning from non-humans, exploring both scientific and indigenous knowledge, and developing a culture of care that participates in the flourishing of the web of life that is soil. Together, the Soil Wagon and Soil Carers become living ambassadors of soil and care practices. 

Facilitators 
 

STEPHANIE POWER-CARTER
GAHDT Leadership Faculty Fellow
Professor, Teaching and Learning
Power-Carter is a professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning and the Director of the Center for Video Ethnography and Discourse analysis (CVEDA). Her passion is to engage in research that helps us to see each other’s humanity more fully. She uses discourse analysis a way to see and examine how people use language to negotiate their identities and to better understand how Black youth, and youth from historically resilient communities navigate their educational experiences. Power-Carter's scholarship examines the resilience, possibility and potential of Black youth.

CHRISTA B. TESTON
GAHDT Leadership Faculty Fellow
Andrea Lunsford Designated Associate Professor of English
Teston studies how humans navigate uncertainty in technoscientific, biomedical and media-rich domains. Specifically, she researches the evidential backstage, or all the work that goes on behind the scenes when experts attempt to corral chaos. Her first book — Bodies in Flux: Scientific Methods for Negotiating Medical Uncertainty (University of Chicago Press) — critiques the fetishization of certainty and advocates for an ethic of care that honors human fragility and bodily flux.

Learn more

To learn more about the Society of Fellows program and  faculty and student cohorts, visit the Society of Fellows homepage.