Syllabus/content/topic/commoningcare.md

title	has_sessions
Commoning Care	mappingtheinvisible, radicalredistribution, unproductiveresistance, exploringinterdependencies, transgenerationalassembly, owtobuildapiratekindergarteninyourneighbourhood

Introduction

Both “commoning” and “care” are concepts around which many thoughts (and practices) have produced and grown in the last decades. Therefore to bring these terms together, it is risky – indeed may sound confusing – but it is also a strategy to create a perspective, a viewpoint through which to navigate these concepts without making them abstract and consequently delivering its uses to capitalistic moves. This reterritorialization happens frequently; let’s think to terms such as "queer" or "participation" (to cite a few), which have been quickly taken by markets investment strategies and state controlling practices on propriety. However, the battle on language never settles: we always lose and take back concepts, inventing and reinventing meanings and perspective through which a word shows its worlds.

Thus, instead of trying to give a stable then imprecise definition to “Commoning Care”, I prefer following some citations which I find useful to explore these terms and its possible meanings when conjoined:

“Care is everything that is done (rather than everything that “we” do) to maintain, continue, and repair “the world” so that all (rather than “we”) can live in it as well as possible. That world includes . . . all that we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web (modified from Tronto 1993, 103).” - Maria Puig de la Bellacasa

“To speak of the commons as if it were a natural resource is misleading at best and dangerous at worst – the commons is an activity and, if anything, it expresses relationships in society that are inseparable from relations to nature. It might be better to keep the word as a verb, an activity, rather than as a noun, a substantive.” - Peter Linebaugh

Therefore:

“Being-in-common – that is, community – can no longer be thought of or felt as a community of humans alone; it must become multi-species community that includes all of those with whom our livelihoods are interdependent and interrelated.”- Katherine Gibson

Let's talk a bit about the context now. In the last decades, the organization of social reproduction – the daily and generational reproductive labour occurring in households, schools, hospitals, communities, lands, etc. – has become a subject of inquiry and a central topic from the perspective of capital investments and the labour market: a battle-ground of privatization, regulation and power dynamics along the lines of gender, race, and class. 

Within a western perspective, the one I am doing and thinking from, it has occurred that the welfare system crisis has caused many people to be ‘left behind.’ One response has been a market-oriented “techno-solutionist” (Evgeny Morozov, 2013) hope on digital technologies to help society address the reorganization of care needs (i.e., Apps on health prevention). That said, these technologies are mostly developed for individual connected users, and are conferring a special status to technicians involved in defining and solving societal problems. Though, another response has seen people turn to more common ways of organizing care themselves. Such is the case of the rise of the cooperatives’ platform movement, of transnational collectivities experimenting with “Instituting Otherwise” methods (BAK, 2016), or of practices of radical redistribution of income, time, spaces, and knowledge. These communities are positioning care as specific forms of situated embodied practices tinkered to technologies; are refusing exploitation and the present of work; are expressing a different vision of transformation through commoning wealth and health; are practicing different conceptualizations of value and values; and, finally, are rethinking assemblages and kinships from a non-human centric perspective.

However, commoning care practices have been further marginalized, criminalized, and restricted by governments around the world: from collective spaces evacuated through the use of a strategic conservative bureaucracy, to the individual criminalization of collective actions. In this sense, the framework of “Pirate Care” can propose a clear understanding of the link between the rise of commoning care practices and the response of capital to it.

Despite repression, looking from the perspective of common strategies to survive more livable lives, it is easy to see a renewed need and interest in autonomous school practices throughout Europe. Indeed, these material experimentations are spreading for issues connected to access to public service, as well as the necessity to rethink pedagogies as a battleground through which to maintain open the possibility of living futures. Thus, we can look at these practices as the creation of collective tools through which both to undo what we have been taught, and to collectively rebuild awareness on our needs, by escaping “the hegemony of Capitalocentrism” (J. K. Gibson-Graham, 1996).

However, it is self-evident how the possibility to change perspective is linked to the implementation of a collective value redefinition based on our understanding of the asymmetries that differentiate us. Moreover, how the “ethical and political obligation” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) of keeping together (and alive) complicated more-than-human assemblages, is nowadays urgent.

The following sessions are based on a workshopping practice making use of tools from radical play, creative and visual methods for social research and speculative interventions. The selected workshops are straightforward, although able to bring the discussion on complex topics (such as social reproduction, anti-work, the social organization of normative). Their aim is to collectively visualize and understand in playful ways:

• the present relation of power and its asymmetries (01. Mapping the Invisible; 02. Radical Redistribution)(link);
• the involvement of our decisions in determining common futures, and the power when decisions are organized and displayed (03. Unproductive Resistance; 04. Exploring Interdependencies)(link);
• finally, the possibilities that forms of “commoning care” ca unfold (05. Transgenerational Assembly; 06. How to build a pirate kindergarten in your neighbourhood)(link).

In conclusion, “commoning care” is here related to creative methods and collective ‘rituals’ to escape the capital hegemony within childcare and schooling pedagogies. However, “commoning care” is broadly intended as a way to state that the only work that as to be done immediately, is the one which aims to undo capitalism together.

Enjoy and fork.

To add, to suggest, to ask: @maddalenafragnito

General Bibliography

• ResearchGate. ‘(2) (PDF) Rebelling with Care. Exploring Open Technologies for Commoning Healthcare.’ Accessed 4 February 2020. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335911369_Rebelling_with_Care_Exploring_open_technologies_for_commoning_healthcare.
• Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Duke University Press, 2010.
• Aranda, Julieta, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle. Are You Working Too Much?: Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art. Sternberg Press, 2011.
• Barbiana, Scuola di, and Lorenzo Milani. Lettera a una professoressa. Mondadori, 2017.
• Berardi, Franco. The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. Semiotext(e), 2009.
• Bezanson, Kate, and Meg Luxton. Social Reproduction: Feminist Political Economy Challenges Neo-Liberalism. McGill-Queen’s Press - MQUP, 2006.
• Bhattacharya, Tithi. Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. Pluto Press, 2017.
• Black, Bob. The Abolition of Work. A new world in our hearts, 2005.
• Borgonuovo, Valerio, and Silvia Franceschini. Global tools (1973-1975). Quando l’educazione coinciderà con la vita. Ediz. illustrata. Produzioni Nero, 2018.
• Chicchi, Federico, and Anna Simone. Società della prestazione. Ediesse, 2017.
• Citton, Yves. Pour une écologie de l’attention. Le Seuil, 2014.
• Codello, Francesco. La campanella non suona più. Fine dei sistemi scolastici e alternative libertarie possibili. Edizioni La Baronata, 2015.
• Cooper, Melinda. Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism. Zone Books, 2019.
• Costa, Mariarosa Dalla, and Selma James. The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community. Falling Wall Press Ltd, 1975.
• Crabb, R. L. The Abolition of Work. 1996.
• Cristina, Vega Solís. Culturas del cuidado en transición: Espacios, sujetos e imaginarios en una sociedad de migración. Editorial UOC, 2016.
• Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race & Class. Penguin UK, 2019.
• Denti, Roberto. Conversazioni con Marcello Bernardi. Il libertario intollerante. Elèuthera, 1996.
• Dolci, Danilo. For the Young. Macgibbon & Kee, 1967.
• Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times. U of Minnesota Press, 2016.
• ‘Facendo-a-Pezzi-La-Cultura-Della-Monogamia.Pdf’. Accessed 8 February 2020. https://anarcoqueer.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/facendo-a-pezzi-la-cultura-della-monogamia.pdf.
• Fachinelli, Elvio. Il Bambino Dalle Uova D’oro. Feltrinelli Editore, 1974.
• Fachinelli, Elvio, Luisa Muraro, and Giuseppe Sartori. L’erba voglio: pratica non autoritaria nella scuola. Einaudi, 1973.
• ‘Famiglia-Nocivitc3a0-Patriarcale-per-Lettura.Pdf’. Accessed 8 February 2020. https://anarcoqueer.files.wordpress.com/2017/02/famiglia-nocivitc3a0-patriarcale-per-lettura.pdf.
• Federici, Silvia. ‘Social Reproduction Theory’, n.d., 4.
• Federici, Silvia. Wages Against Housework. Falling Wall Press [for] the Power of Women Collective, 1975.
• Fragnito, Maddalena. ‘Come Aprire Un Nido Pirata Nel Quartiere’, 25 February 2019. https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:23285/.
• Franklin, Sarah, and Susan McKinnon. Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Duke University Press, 2001.
• Freeman, Jo. ‘THE TYRANNY OF STRUCTURELESSNESS’. Berkeley Journal of Sociology 17 (1972): 151–64.
• Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2014.
• Garganté, Christel Keller. ‘Grupos de Crianza Compartida’. E-Quaderns - Institut Català D'Antropologia. Accessed 8 February 2020. https://www.academia.edu/36977188/Grupos_de_Crianza_Compartida.
• Gibson-Graham, J. K., Jenny Cameron, and Stephen Healy. Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities. University of Minnesota Press, 2013. www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt32bcgj.
• Giuseppe Allegri, Sabrina Del Pico, Andrea Fumagalli, Sandro Gobetti, Cristina Morini, Luca Santini, and Rachele Serino. Generazioni Precarie. Una conricerca tra percezione del rischio, bisogni emergenti, welfare dal basso. Trento: Università degli Studi di Trento, 2018. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1169827.
• Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Penguin Books, 1990.
• Graeber, David. (2013) On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs Strike! Magazine. Accessed June 7, 2014. http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
• Haraway, Donna. ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’. Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066.
• Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.
• Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. Harvard University Press, 2009.
• Haworth, Robert H. ‘Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections’. Accessed 8 February 2020. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=OHH7BgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Anarchist+Pedagogies:+Collective+Actions,+Theories,+and+Critical+Reflections+on+Education&hl=it&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi_95Tc4sLnAhUfQxUIHZ1kDW4Q6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q=Anarchist%20Pedagogies%3A%20Collective%20Actions%2C%20Theories%2C%20and%20Critical%20Reflections%20on%20Education&f=false.
• Hooks, Bell. Teaching To Transgress. Routledge, 2014.
• Iconoclasistas. ‘Manual of Collective Mapping. Critical Cartographic Resources for Territorial Processes of Collaborative Creation (2016) |  Mapeo Colectivo y Herramientas de Código Abierto’. Accessed 8 February 2020. https://www.academia.edu/28625755/Manual_of_Collective_Mapping.Critical_cartographic_resources_for_territorial_processes_of_collaborative_creation_2016.
• Illich, Ivan. Deschooling Society. Camas Books, 2018.
• James, Selma. Sex, Race and Class, the Perspective of Winning: A Selection of Writings 1952-2011. PM Press, 2012.
• keller, christel. ‘Grupos de Crianza Compartida’. Accessed 8 February 2020. https://www.academia.edu/36977188/Grupos_de_Crianza_Compartida.
• Korczak, Janusz. A Child’s Right to Respect. Office of the Provincial Advocate for Children and Youth, 2017.
• ‘La Famiglia è Una Nocività Patriarcale’. Accessed 8 February 2020. https://bibliotecaanarchica.org/library/la-famiglia-e-una-nocivita-patriarcale.html.