-Adrianna
My thoughts after reading “Everything is a Metaphor: Care as Praxis”…
Not sure if it’s because of the plant references, but I really enjoyed reading this. The forest metaphor and poem really got me thinking. It teaches us that to care is to evolve. When you care for others and yourself, you grow (from plant to forest). A forest is an abundance of life and its ecosystem is a community. This makes me think back to the Tsing reading we did on the first day about mushrooms and communities.
Two lines that stood out:
“Ultimately, he identified that part of his challenge in defining care stemmed from the fact that it looks different for everyone and manifests differently in different contexts.”
-Perhaps today is a good time to re-define care as a collective. How do we all re-define care? As this reading suggests, care varies from person to person. But as the semester progressed we’ve all been constantly defining and redefining power, precarity and care. Since the first day of class and up until last week, I’ve been thinking about care as “self-care”. But now that I’m working on my final projects (they’re about community and feminism) I find myself rethinking my definition of care. Now, I see care as “community care”. Perhaps the best way I embody it is through respecting others and practicing active listening .
“Care requires both time and attention. Time. And. Attention.”
-This is the million dollar question I’ve had all semester. I’d love to practice this type of pedagogy. My question is How? What if we as students + adjuncts don’t have the time? How can we properly care for other AND ourselves at the same time? I still feel like this seems hard to achieve due to our precarious position in the institution.
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Adrianna, I too was reflecting on the idea that care entails time and attention. How then, can one in such precarious positions, such as adjuncting, afford the necessary time to conduct such care. Pedagogy as care, in a system that does not use that same time and attention to engage in care to their adjuncts and contingent workers. In this sense, I see care as a shield or armor, where we weather the conditions (overworked, underpaid) and still attempt to adopt a pedagogy of care. Care is a shield that enables care as a…sword? These feel like violent metaphors, but care exists within violent and harmful conditions, so perhaps it is appropriate.
Adrianna, I’ve been thinking a lot as well about collective care vs individual care; I’ve been specifically thinking about: how do we bring individuals who are disconnected / feeling a lack of care, into a space that gives them connection? The discourse around loneliness as a public health crisis (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/may/02/us-surgeon-general-warning-loneliness) is current but also not new, and it resonates with what I’ve witnessed re: a lot of friends disconnecting from community over the last three years, but I’m not totally sure what the responsibility is on communities to bring those folks in, or how to do it in a care-ing/-ful way.
Like: how do you convince someone that what they need is collective care, if they don’t see that themselves or recognize how to be part of something that’s collective?