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Morten Nissen will present a current project, which is a qualitative experimental study of the modeling of care, aimed at contributing to cultivating the competence in care. That competence is in much demand yet neglected, given current changes in governance and infrastructures of knowledge. While most ideas about care focus on interpersonal relations, some recent theories view care as involving socio-material networks of persons, institutions, technologies and knowledges. This, in turn, means that care work includes working with a wide variety of representations or models - images, texts, narratives, etc. – that lock into different institutions and infrastructures, but always must be handled with a view to their relevance for singular persons and situations. This work is what we should aim to articulate and qualify if we wish to cultivate care. The empirical field of the study is a Copenhagen institution for young drug users, where they experiment with ways of modeling persons and care for them, including ‘aesthetic documentation’.

Morten Nissen is professor at the Department of Education, Aarhus University, chair of the research program ‘Rearticulating the Formation of Motivation’. He mostly studies practices of social work with theories of subjectivity, collectivity and aesthetics.