Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha begins Care Work: Dreaming Disability with the question: “What does it mean to shift our ideas of access and care (whether it’s disability, childcare, economic access, or many more) from an individual chore, an unfortunate cost of having and unfortunate body, to a collective responsibility that’s maybe even deeply joyful?”(3).  It’s a question permeating the book as a whole. As Piepzna-Samarasinha argues, transforming care from its neoliberal state of individual onus to a collective ethics of responsibility brings about a reimagining of not only disability justice, but justice of all kinds. Care, Piepzna-Samarasinha argues, is the antithesis to the ableist, heterosexist, racist, carceral, and colonial forms of governance, and centering care not only reveals the ineptitude and violence of such systems but orients to vitally alternate models of living. It is a sentiment that speaks to an array of social justice horizons and projects. Rinaldo Walcott’s critical engagement with property and ownership illuminates how such cultures are distinctly at odds with collective care. Property, Walcott elaborates, and the carceral logics brought about by its protection and regulation, is distinctly in tension with other forms of living, space-making, and communal life. Opposing the neoliberal evisceration of public space and veneration of property, today, Walcott proposes, is an act of radical “architectural care.” Walcott’s framing gives a tangible focus to an array of more abstract articulations of the present order. As Christina Sharpe writes, living in the wake of slavery, and, more generally, the tides of entangled enslaved labour extraction and Indigenous dispossession, renders a “reimagining[ing] and transform[ing of] spaces for and practices of an ethics of care (as in repair, maintenance, and attention” essential) (131). 

At the same time that care offers an antithesis to the colonial, neoliberal, and late capitalist present, others–working in an array of traditions–have resisted endowing care with innately generative disposition. As thinkers and activists have illuminated, care, in compromised worlds, is likewise susceptible to exploitation, and thus bears the potential to reinforce the systems it ostensibly counteracts. Care, through this frame, is not a morally innate phenomenon but malleable, circumstantial, and differentiated. Eve Tuck and K. Yang’s oft-cited “Decolonization is not a Metaphor” cautions to the ways in which the languages, discourses, and gestures of institutional “care” can become hollow, and indeed, reiterative of the systems they ostensibly oppose. The potential for the outward languages of care to be co-opted by institutions, they suggest, necessitates wariness of how care’s expressions can become “empty signifier[s]” (7). South African scholars Babalwa Magoqwana, Qawekazi Maqabuka and Malehoko Tshoaedi echo this analysis, emphasizing how, within colonial institutions, care work is often gendered and racialized, with certain demographics being disproportionately  “forced to care.” As they assert, in this context, “care work” reflects a culture wherein (typically Black women’s) “unpaid woman’s labour (reproduction) is linked to the paid labour (production) of the capitalist system (7). Such forms of invisible labour, they argue, are both necessary “for the mass of Black students from working-class backgrounds to cope under neoliberal university cultures in the South African Higher Education system” and remain informal, and thus, invisible, within such institutional schemes. If, for Walcott, the abolition of property opens space for new “architectures of care,” Magoqwana, Maqabuka, and Tshoaedi simultaneously elaborate how unsettling “care” itself reveals the power-laden architectures of spaces and how those spaces are maintained.

Today, the seemingly paradoxical associations of “care work”—as both a “sub-category of work” and “the labour that makes all other labour possible”; as both the “serious attention or consideration applied to doing something correctly” (Oxford) and a cultural concept, offering visions of living outside the present order—captures the tense, intuitive, productive, and unlikely ways care and work come into relation. In one sense, the altruistic implications of “care” suggests its separation from the transactional associations of work; simultaneously, “work,” and its alignment with notions of investment and return, transactions and contracts, seems to productively hold “care” accountable to the differently distributed ways in which care’s labour and impulses are expected and embodied. In their essay on “Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times,” Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Tamara Kneese articulate these dynamics concisely, emphasizing how the tensions posed by “care work” are what make it integral to, and uneasy within, social justice work: “Because care is inseparable from systemic inequality and power structures, it can be used to coerce subjects into new forms of surveillance and unpaid labor, to make up for institutional neglect, and even to position some groups against others, determining who is worthy of care and who is not. Even so, in the face of state-sanctioned violence, economic crisis, and impending ecological collapse, collective care offers a way forward” (2). We thus might “define radical care” they argue, “as a set of vital but underappreciated strategies for enduring precarious worlds” (2). 

In this second issue of Refractions, we ask what “care work” invites us to see of both matters of care and matters of work: When we refract “care” through questions of labour, what is revealed about the various economies, strategies and legacies of productivity, the architectures of institutions, and their means of stability, growth, and survival? When we refract “work” through questions of care, what possibilities emerge for conceptualizing more ethical and equitable approaches to our places, practices, and concepts of work? This issue’s contributors offer a rich variety of approaches for taking up these questions. Through policy, literary, media, visual, and cultural studies, and through reflection, analysis, documentation, and critique, our contributors illuminate the unequal and uneven ways the work of care settles in the cultural lexicon. Importantly, these pieces also highlight the generative ways care is mobilized, as a practice, concept, and approach, to combating colonial power and it’s legacies.

These insights manifest in a variety of ways. As several of our contributors have illuminated, foregrounding care, as a relation, affectation, and ethic, transforms and yields new insights into a variety of labour practices–from land restoration, to the interpretation of art, to conference organizing. In “Gekinoomaadijig Mashkiki Gitigaaning Endazhi-Baakwaanaatigikaag: Restoring Land Relations Through Indigenous Leadership in an Urban Park,” for example, the 440 Parkside Collective reveals how approaching land restoration as work of plant, animal, and human community care, transforms the “urban” and “wild,” “human” and “nonhuman” binaries driving much of colonial land management, and inspires more sustainable, dynamic, and holistic land relations. As the Collective’s photo essay reveals, in thinking about restoration as community-building, the labour of restoration is transformed from merely supporting quantifiable species growth, to cultivating and investing in an ecosystem’s mutually-afflicting ecological, cultural, social, aesthetic, and political components. It’s a framework that finds resonance in Emily Collins’ piece. In “Care in/as Resistance: Excess, Chorus, and Liminality in Sonia Boyce’s Feeling Her Way,” Collins, likewise, emphasizes how care, and resistance to colonial and oppressive regimes, are mutually constitutive. Sonya Boyce’s multimedia multi-sensory artwork at the 59th Venice Biennale, Collins illuminates, is both an art object and a pedagogical experience—one that utilizes the aesthetics of the chorus, and the experience of witness and liminality, to “affirm transformation, diversity, and disruption, to the status quo.” As Collins’ reflection reveals, in taking care to construct the experience of a chorus, Boyce’s piece simultaneously facilitates a viewer experience that necessarily recognizes the constellated, collective, and communal ways in which meaning sounds forth.

Collins’ essay, and its discussion of the sonic, visual, and aesthetic frequencies of care work, finds dialogue with other contributions in this collection. In her excerpt, “Dear Nani,” Zinnia Naqvi mobilizes care work as a means of approaching visual, photographic texts, and particularly, photos of family and kin. Here Naqvi outlines the ways in which the work of visual interpretation and the work of care find each other through intimate analytical practices: Exercising situated and immersive forms of noticing and attention, and investing in the context and subtext of her diasporic family depicted, enables Naqvi’s own perspective, as a “maker in the west” and a “daughter and granddaughter” come into dialogue with the ways in which agency and performance circulate in the images. Naqvi’s essay, posing questions about the work and care of archival interpretation, aligns itself, in some ways, with other reflections in our issue. Avani Tandon Vieira, Lauryn Anderson, and Anna Corrigan’s contribution, “Activist/Aesthetics Conference: A Reflection,” co-written as their the activist/aesthetics research collective, reflects on care work through the frame of student-led organizing. Their contribution—a collage reflection on the Activist Aesthetics conference they organized in June, 2023—reimagines the traditional conference proceedings to utilize the genre towards a more experimental, collaborative, aesthetic, and ultimately, active experience. Their visual meditation on the conference materialized a practice of thinking beyond the “demands of academic hegemony” and rather, prioritizing “creativity, care, and collaboration.” As their contribution reveals, foregrounding creative approaches to care, within conference organizing and its proceeding work, generates radically different spaces, avenues, and media by which to perceive and reflect on experiences of knowledge-building and sharing.

Alongside the practice-based and media-oriented contributions to this issue, another significant dimension of this issue is the literary exploration of how care and work coalesce. In “The Importance of t4t Care Webs, Witness, and Affirmation in Casey Plett’s Little Fish,” Chase Thomson analyzes how care work relates to, and is represented within, the trans communities in Casey Plett’s novel, Little Fish. Drawing from scholars working on t4t (transgender for transgender) care webs and ideas of ethical witnessing, Thomson illuminates the vital necessity of care webs for the resiliency and empowerment of marginalized communities. Thomson’s analysis not only orients to the presence of care webs in Plett’s work, but also, demonstrates care work as a literary praxis: Their essay outlines how care webs and ethical witnessing present not only literary themes in Plett’s text, but also, approaches to filling institutional gaps and contending with marginalizing political structures generally. Care work, Thomson’s essay reveals, is thus crucial to world-making, not only within the world of the novel, but the one outside of it. The simultaneously literary and socio-political significance of care work is likewise reflected upon is Christina Wiendels’ essay, “Interrogating the ‘Social Good’: (Un)Happiness for Racialized and Gendered Bodies in Taylor’s “The Devastating Boys” and Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen.” If Thompson’s work emphasizes how recognition of Plett’s novel’s networks of care is made possible by reading with care, Wiendels, alternatively, traces the diversely distributed experience and labour of care that literature renders visible. Reading Elizabeth Taylor’s short story “The Devastating Boys” in comparison with Buchi Emecheta's novel, The Second Class Citizen, Wiendels traces the ‘the burden of happiness,’ and particularly, its intimacy and proximity with the racial dynamics these works each depict. Wiendels work reveals how happiness is simultaneously configured as a “social good” and weaponized, as a system of othering and marginalization. Considering the “disempowering ideals of happiness,” Wiendels reveals, illuminates how ostensibly “universal” positive affects hold intimacy with racial forms of power—a dynamic that renders such affects both central to, and yet, elusive within, the study of institutional spaces. It’s a literary study, thus, that finds strong accompaniment in amanda wan’s review of Xine Yao’s Unfeeling. Imperial modes of seeing, wan’s review of Yao’s book elaborates, “have produced persistent tropes of racialized, gendered, and disabled illegibility.” Unfeelling, wan summarizes, is a response to illegibility—a kind of refusal to care, practicing a disaffection to “white sentimental fantasies of universal sympathy.” As wan’s analysis reveals, in response to the colonial agenda of legible “universal” feeling (such as happiness), artists, writers, and activists have produced an array of affects—oftentimes not recognized as feeling—whose very illegibility offer forms of resistance and liberation.

The affordances, pitfalls, and dynamics of care work come together, finally, in contributions to this issue situated in policy. In Ingrid Monsivais Ibarra’s essay, “Care-Imperialism and the Feminization of the Global South in Canadian Policy,” Canadian caregiver immigration policy is the primary subject. As Ibarra’s essay reveals, alongside granting of global mobility and opportunity, these programs also instil imperial relations, facilitating patterns in gendered labour, and the exploitation of gendered labour, hedging Canada and the global south. As Ibarra proposes, these programs work to assign and reiterate relations wherein the Global South assumes a feminine role with respect to the Global North, animating, thus, how imperial dynamics of exploitative care extraction are reiterated through immigration programs and policy. Rendering these dynamics visible, Ibarra’s essay suggests, is a vital component to rethinking how “care” is valued, and therefore, enacting just policies for contingent, migrant labourers. It is a sentiment that finds resonance in Katie Sullivan’s essay,“None of us is well”: Cripping Health Communism and Embracing Care.” Like the discourses surrounding Canada’s immigration policy, endowing Healthcare systems with notions of genuine care overlooks, Sullivan’s work illuminates the extractive, exploitative systems upholding them. As Sullivan reveals, moving away from a for-profit health industry model of healthcare and towards disability centered approaches is a necessary shift in rendering care central, and importantly, a collective impetus. Informed by a health-for-all perspective, Sullivan makes the case for a reimagined economy, one wherein health is not an individual trait based on ‘deservingness’ and commodified “well being” but a communal necessity, informed by disability justice. It is a framing that not only reveals the exclusions and marginalizing logics of our current, hyper-individualized healthcare system, but orients to the significance of disability studies and activism, as a form of vital resistance to the capitalist state.

In dialogue, the contributors to this issue both advocate for the merits of “care” as a phenomenon that is fundamentally lacking in the current order, and offers alternate—more equitable, communal, intimate, and reciprocal, ways of living and being both within and outside of it. Indeed, in one sense, these essays necessitate a rethinking of the apparentness of care–whether in healthcare, Canada’s ostensible care for migrant labourers, or the innate merits of happiness–the outward presence of “care,” their work reveals, oftentimes is a starting point to think through its complexity, uneven distribution, and sometimes, systemic death. Simultaneously, as our contributors reveal, thinking through and with care orients to interpretations, relations, and possibilities that look beyond and potentially transform care’s hegemonic constraints, state-sanctioned dictums, and “fictions of the archive” (Sharpe). Whether through the work of media and literary interpretation, land restoration, or conference organizing, foregrounding care—as an approach and theme—generates new, collective, and oftentimes, hopeful, ways of seeing subjects, and being in relation to them.

We are endlessly grateful to this issue’s contributors for their time, creativity, insight, work and care. We hope our reader’s derive as much inspiration from their work as we did.

Warmly,

Priscilla and Sadie

Works Cited:

Eve Tuck, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Tabula Rasa, vol. 38, 2021, pp. 61–111.

Hobart, Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani, and Kneese Tamara. “Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times.” Social Text, vol. 38, no. 1, 2020, pp. 1–16.

Magoqwana, Babalwa, et al. “‘forced to Care’ at the Neoliberal University: Invisible Labour As Academic Labour Performed by Black Women Academics in the South African University.” South African Review of Sociology, vol. 50, no. 3, 2019, pp. 6–21.

Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. Care Work : Dreaming Disability Justice. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018.

Walcott, Rinaldo. On Property. First ed., Biblioasis, 2021.