The Care Collective: Lynne Segal, Andreas Chatzidakis, Jamie Hakim, Jo Littler, and Catherine Rottenberg, formed in 2017, originally as a London-based reading group aiming to understand and address the multiple crises of care.
We are in the midst of a global crisis of care. How do we get out of it? The Care Manifesto puts care at the heart of the debates of our current crisis: from intimate care–childcare, healthcare, elder care–to care for the natural world.
We live in a world where carelessness reigns, but it does not have to be this way. The Care Manifesto puts forth a vision for a truly caring world. The authors want to reimagine the role of care in our everyday lives, making it the organising principle in every dimension and at every scale of life. We are all dependent on each other, and only by nurturing these interdependencies can we cultivate a world in which each and every one of us can not only live but thrive.
The Care Manifesto demands that we must put care at the heart of the state and the economy. A caring government must promote collective joy, not the satisfaction of individual desire. This means the transformation of how we organise work through co-operatives, localism and nationalisation. It proposes the expansion of our understanding of kinship for a more ‘promiscuous care’. It calls for caring places through the reclamation of public space, to make a more convivial city. It sets out an agenda for the environment, most urgent of all, putting care at the centre of our relationship to the natural world.
This part of the ART & CARE series, a collaboration between Cambridge School of Art (Anglia Ruskin University, UK), Drew University (US) and the Care Ethics Consortium (NL). “Taking care of” is an activity that includes “everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible.”(Fisher, Tronto 1990). The series aims at facilitating post-disciplinary conversations through the lens of creative research, care ethics and practices.