Who Cares: Self Care and Caregiving in the Americas

Catalog description

Who Cares: Self-Care and Caregiving in the Americas: Self-care is everywhere these days, circulating as a marketing tool, refuge from (and in) consumer goods, fix for productivity, and cure for burn out. This course takes a critical approach to the concept of self-care exploring the different intellectual traditions from which it emerges, including a Black feminist lineage that positions it as a radical tool for change as well as literatures that critique it as neoliberal form of self-making. It then turns to specific ethnographic examples asking how care plays out in different places and historical moments across the Americas. The course will foreground how care can be transformational, how the right to care is unevenly distributed, and how self-care for some relies on and elides the caring labor of others