Organised by Jules Allen, Yasmeen Arif, Asiya Islam, Clare Walsh, and Sibylla Warrington
This Symposium examines the “tensions of care” that permeate the everyday practices, politics and infrastructures of care particularly in the Global South. Building on debates about the crisis of care and the unequal distribution of reproductive labour, the collection foregrounds how care is simultaneously sustaining and depleting, agentic and constraining, enabling and exploitative. By centring proximate, vernacular and historically situated forms of care, the contributions reveal how caring relations are shaped by gendered, racialised and classed inequalities, and how they are mobilised within neoliberal, capitalist and imperial formations. The papers and two audio-visual interventions (available here and here) illuminate contradictions inherent in care—from sustaining life under conditions of scarcity to reinforcing those very conditions—and offer vocabularies such as ambivalence, friction and contradiction to analyse these dynamics. While attentive to care’s limits and its entanglement with structures of harm, the Symposium also highlights moments of resistance, relationality and alternative possibilities for collective and institutional care.
Tensions of Care: Symposium Introduction by Jules Allen, Yasmeen Arif, Asiya Islam, Clare Walsh, and Sibylla Warrington
Subsidising Extraction: Care at Work in Zambia’s Copper Mines by Emma Lochery, Thomas McNamara, and James Musonda
(Un)safe Spaces: Navigating Risk and Protection in Pakistani Women’s Hostels by Yasmeen Arif
The Ethics of Self-Care: Risk, Responsibility, and Reproduction in Chile by Martina Yopo Díaz
“In the Guaraní world, our way of being isn’t to make something to sell. We’re always in family, sharing”: Gendered Frictions of Care and Commerce in Peri-Urban Bolivia by Sibylla Warrington
Public Library Workers, Unconditional Hospitality, and Shared Leadership by Barbara Adams and John A. Bruce
Trust Issues: A Micro-History of Community-Based “Institutions of Care” in Colonial Statecraft by Ranjit Kandalgaonkar
Featured image: Women’s Strike poster, Stuart Hall at the First Women’s Liberation Conference Creche, Oxford 1970