The Politics of Care

Catalog description

The defining events of 2020 – the pandemic and its unequal distribution of death and precarity on people of color, women, and the poor and the continuous police violence and killings of black citizens and the ensuing protests – have led to a call for an alternative political vision based on “care.” In one sense this is a material demand for equal access to healthcare, resources (housing, food, and basic necessities), and protections for “essential workers” (those tasked with care’s labors). In another sense, a politics of care signals a different political imaginary that runs in opposition to liberalism’s discourse of individual rights that has more recently found amplification in neoliberalism’s brutal discourse of personal responsibility and the ever-widening privatization of the commons. This other imaginary insists on our connectedness and interdependence and centers caring for others, our world, and our natural environment. In this course we will explore the material and theoretical demands of a politics of care (and how the material and theoretical are mutually reinforcing). Of course, there is a history of care (and “love”) as central to an oppositional politics from anti-racist and feminist theorists such as Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Joan Tronto. We will begin by first readings these earlier calls for a politics of care before turning to present iterations. Current may include Robin Kelley, George Gonsalves, Judith Butler, Silvia Federici, and Anna Tsing.