Care in Critical Times

What is care? How can and do communities mobilize care as a social intervention, political act, and tool for building intimacy, healing, and hope? Now more than ever it is imperative that we care for ourselves and our communities, but caring is not an apolitical or individual act. We must analyze the inherent inequalities and social dimensions of what it means to give and receive care. Employing a feminist mode of inquiry and an engaged anthropology approach, this course requires students to not only ask how they might engage in caring acts with their own communities, but to develop a locally-based community project that brings care, in all its multifariousness, to the fore. Readings focus on ethnographic, scholarly, and public-facing works that illustrate how culture, social relations, and systems of power shape the experiences, roles, practices, and interactions of individuals and their communities in the exchange of care.