Cassie Thornton - Care in the Ruins

Roundtable Discussion with IAS Visiting Fellow Cassie Thornton, guest speakers Dr Valeria Graziano, Evie Muir and Loughborough colleagues Dr Victoria Browne (International Relations, Politics and History), Dr Jade French (English and the Health Humanities) and Dr Catherine Coveney (Criminology, Sociology and Social Policy), moderated by Radar Curator Dr Lucy Lopez. As part of Cassie Thornton’s IAS fellowship, this roundtable discussion focuses on strategies for practicing care amidst the ruins: how can we engage in acts of solidarity, of rest, and of vital healthcare, when societal infrastructures fail? In addition to artist Cassie Thornton, we will be inviting two guest speakers: Dr Valeria Graziano, researcher and one of the conveners of Pirate Care, a research project and network which stands for a common care infrastructure; and writer Evie Muir, whose work advocates for rest, healing and resistance as abolitionist praxis. Loughborough colleagues Dr Jade French, Dr Victoria Browne, and Dr Catherine Coveney will introduce how their work aligns with the question of care in the ruins, from research in the Health Humanities, aging studies and intergenerational care, to the politics of reproduction, to the sociology of sleep and chronic illness. Cassie’s visit is also supported by Dr Rachael Grew (International Relations, Politics and History), whose research looks at the concept of the ‘monstrous’ in relation to genders, bodies and identities. Valeria Graziano (she/her) is a cultural theorist, educator and organizer based in Rijeka, Croatia. Her research is rooted in collective practice and centers on strategies of work refusal, the commoning of social reproduction, and the politics of pleasure. Valeria’s work has been published in a range of journals and books, including MIT Press; Artforum; Theory & Event; ephemera and Cultural Studies. Currently, she is lead researchers of “Figure It Out. The Art of Living Through System Failures” (CREA-CULT-2022-COOP-1) and coordinator of the working group "Analysis, Theory & Politics of Care" (COST Action CA21102). Her book Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity, co-authored with Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak, is forthcoming from Pluto Press in 2025. Evie Muir (she/they) is a nature writer, author of Radical Rest: Notes on Burnout, Healing and Hopeful Futures, and founder of Peaks of Colour, a Peak District based nature-for-healing community group by and for people of colour. Their work sits on the intersections of gendered, racial and land justice, and seeks to nurture survivors’ joy, rest, hope and imagination as Black Feminist and abolitionist praxis. Cassie Thornton (any pronoun) is an artist, writer and organizer who makes a “safe space” for the unknown, for disobedience, and for unanticipated collectivity. In her recent work she explores the struggle of reorganizing and using privilege in the apocalypse. She uses social practices including institutional critique, insurgent architecture, and “healing modalities” like hypnosis and yoga to find soft spots in the hard surfaces of capitalist life. Cassie has invented a grassroots alternative credit reporting service for the survivors of gentrification, has hypnotized hedge fund managers, has finger-painted with the grime found inside banks, has donated cursed paintings to profiteering bankers, and has taught feminist economics to yogis (and vice versa). She is currently a co-organizer of a bar that is an undercover clinic in Berlin. Her 2020 book, The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future, is available from Pluto Press. For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias