Syllabus/content/topic/commoningcare.md

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

Introduction

Both “commoning” and “care” are concepts around which many theories (and practices) have emerged and grown in the last decades. Therefore, it is risky – and indeed may sound confusing – to bring these terms together, but it is also a strategy to create a perspective, a viewpoint from which to navigate these concepts without making them abstract and consequently delivering their uses to capitalistic moves. Such reterritorialization happens frequently – just think of the terms such as "queer" or "participation" (to name just a few), which have been quickly appropriated by market investment strategies and state's practices of control on propriety. However, the battle over 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 to start from quotes which I find useful to explore these terms and their 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 working and thinking from, it has become evident that the crisis of the welfare system has resulted in many people being "left behind." One response has been a market-oriented “techno-solutionist” (Evgeny Morozov, 2013) hope that the digital technologies will help society address the reorganization of care needs (i.e., through health and disease prevention apps). That said, these technologies are mostly developed for individual connected users, and are conferring a special status to technologisits involved in defining and solving societal problems. Another response has seen people turn to more common ways of organizing care themselves. Such is the case with the rise of platform cooperativism movement, of transnational collectives experimenting with “Instituting Otherwise” methods (BAK, 2016), or of practices of radical redistribution of income, time, space, and knowledge. These communities are positioning care as specific forms of situated embodied practices tinkering with technologies; are refusing exploitation and present labour conditions; 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, the practices of commoning care have been 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 provide a clear understanding of the link between the emerging practices of commoning care and the response of the capital to them.

Despite repression, from the perspective of common strategies to survive and create more livable lives, it is easy to see a renewed need and interest in autonomous practices of education throughout Europe. Indeed, these material experimentations are spreading both for reasons of limited access to public service, as well as necessity to rethink pedagogies as a battleground through which to maintain open a possibility of livable 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 of our needs, while escaping “the hegemony of Capitalocentrism” (J. K. Gibson-Graham, 1996).

However, it is evident that the capacity to change perspective depends on a collective redefinition of value based on our understanding of the asymmetries and differences that exist between us. Furthermore, there is an urgent “ethical and political obligation” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) to keeping together (and alive) complicated more-than-human assemblages.

The following sessions are based on a workshopping practice that makes 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:

• present relations of power and their asymmetries: and ;
• involvement of our decisions in determining common futures, and the power when decisions are organized and displayed: and ;
• finally, the potentials that forms of “commoning care” can unfold and .

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 has to be done immediately is the one which aims to undo capitalism altogether..

Enjoy and fork.

To add, to suggest, to ask: @maddalenafragnito

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