Fatemeh Hosseini | "Curiosity After Care: Imaginative Approaches to Community-Engaged Learning and Research"

This talk begins with a simple provocation: What if care were the starting point of curiosity rather than its end or outcome? Using speculative lenses, I consider how caregiving work and relational labor, so often undervalued and invisibilized, contain their own theories of knowing. I draw from my historical research on red-light labor, as well as from contemporary community-engaged projects with care-givers, to ask: What if our research questions were formed through practices of care? How would our classrooms change if curiosity began with responsibility rather than detachment? In offering possible futures for an academy grounded in care, I consider how curiosity might help us build more accountable and imaginative ways of teaching and knowing.

Dr. Fatemeh Hosseini is the Director of Engaged Scholarship and Pedagogy at the CSJ at Georgetown University. As a historian of gender and sexuality, her primary focus is on working-class women who worked inside and outside of red-light districts in urban vice centers. She explores how cultural and social attitudes shape policy and the lived experiences of sex workers. As an educator, she has taught broadly on the intersection of desire, sex, and commerce globally and worked with and advised students at New York University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Maryland, College Park. Her advocacy and policy experience has been shaped by work with individuals involved in the sex trade and with immigrant survivors of gender-based and intimate-partner violence. She is energized by how knowledge can be created and enhanced by engagement with local communities. Ultimately, she is invested in how institutions of higher education can leverage their resources and knowledge to support, sustain, and heal marginalized and local communities.