Pubbing in the Pandemic: An Exercise in Carework

 Earlier this month, this publication, "Embodying a praxis of care: The urgency of carework in supporting student activists" came out. This is so special, not just because of the work itself, but also because of the process of writing with Vanessa, Hannah, and Elirissa. In some ways, the piece feels like a stranger— the words are unrecognizable because I am not in the same place or position (quite literally, since I moved institutions while writing the piece).

I also love this piece because it reflects a shift in my work and engaging with care and how carework folds into labor, particularly within my larger research agenda of institutional accountability and what we able to describe and distill as institutional carewashing. While the gendering of education and teaching has been well-studied under the lens of feminism (and how related/resultant facets such as emotional labor are then valued as less important), I appreciated the space within this article (and particularly through the lit review) to reimagine and apply carework then to what it means to work with students and work with ourselves. As a result, we were able to draw the connections of institutional carewashing (or the ways institutions declare care without tangible efforts) and apply that to how activism can and has cause harm to the its own activists— a similar parallel to the ways scholars who try to rehumanize the academy (myself included) can recreate neoliberalism. Carework and community-centric responses like mutual aid (see Lydia X. Z. Brown's work) are the necessary ways to respond to the institutionalization of it all. ​​I'll close with one of my favorite quotes from our article (though let's be honest, I loved every sentence haha!): ​

While activism has & continues to be necessary to hold institutions accountable and push for political, societal, organizational change, our emphasis on care & carework grounds activism…beyond institutional transformation as we ourselves are more than the institutional identities, affiliations, and labor placed on us.

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