Description
A virtual teach-in on the new forms of organizing that have been spurred by the sudden visibility of care workers.
This is the second instalment in a four-part teach-in series, co-sponsored by Verso Books and the Relational Poverty Network, entitled Thinking and organising beyond the pandemic, a relational poverty toolkit.
All of our events are freely available, but please make a solidarity donation if you’re able to help us keep putting on these free events.
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As many people are sequestered to slow the spread of the virus, the essential role of certain forms of labor—from healthcare workers to grocery clerks—becomes increasingly visible, while those laborers become yet more vulnerable. The work of care and social reproduction is highlighted, along with the ways in which it has been exploited, endangered, or marginalized in recent decades of neoliberal reform and austerity. Yet the crisis has also inspired new expressions of care, generosity, and solidarity that spring up where existing caring economies and safety nets fail. Panelists will ask: Whose labor has been revealed to be essential and vulnerable? What systems have been (re)invented as a result? How might they redistribute or consolidate privilege—from telemedicine to DIY face-mask manufacturers? What new forms of organizing and solidarity have been spurred by the sudden visibility or vulnerability of care and social reproduction—from wildcat strikes and mutual aid networks to seven-o’clock cheers?
Speakers:
Patricia Lopez is an assistant professor of geography at Dartmouth College. Her work centers on questions of care and care ethics, with attention to health geographies.
Antwanette Lyons is a Care Coordinator at the Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic, a pediatric, primary care clinic of Seattle Children’s Hospital, where patients receive medical, dental, mental health, and nutrition services regardless of income or financial situation.
Maggie Dickinson is an anthropologist and assistant professor at Guttman Community College, City University of New York, and author of Feeding the Crisis: Care and Abandonment in America’s Growing Food Safety Net. Her research focuses on urban food systems, welfare policy, inequality, and the politics of redistribution.
Suzanne Adely is the co-Director of the Food Chain Workers Alliance, a global human rights lawyer with the National Lawyers Guild, and a long-time Arab community organizer.
Dean Spade is a poverty lawyer, professor at Seattle University, and organizer active since the mid-1990s in movements working to end poverty, war, imprisonment, and border enforcement. He is the author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law, and his most recent work explores the political work of mutual aid.
Corrina Chase is a co-founder and organizer with the Portland COVID-19 Mutual Aid Network, a community organization that employs collective power to deliver necessities and respond to requests for material assistance from the Portland community.
The Relational Poverty Network convenes an international community of scholars, teachers, policy makers, and activists working within and beyond academia to develop conceptual frameworks, research methodologies, and pedagogies that shift from thinking about “the poor and poor others” to relationships of power and privilege. They work across boundaries to foster a transnational, comparative and interdisciplinary approach to poverty research that involves multidirectional theory building and incorporates marginalized voices to build innovative concepts for poverty research.
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