care praxes in the classroom, on campus, and beyond
In Spring 2023 I had the opportunity to teach a capstone course for one of my home departments, Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS), at the University of New Hampshire. The course was titled “Feminist Geographies of Care Work and Praxes” and with it I sought to read, study, and dialogue with my students about what it means to practice care rooted in feminist theory with each other in the classroom, on campus in Durham, in our local communities, and beyond. Further, I sought to think about care as a scalar and intentional practice against the grain of patriarchal, racist, and classist institutional and structural norms. Along with my students, mostly WGS minors from across the Durham campus, we spent the semester exploring what self-care really means, what it means to engage in care labor - paid and unpaid - and how we can actively disrupt the “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (hooks, 2004: 17).
As the final project, we co-produced a zine, “Do you have a moment to talk about collective care?” The zine is intended to be shared widely as a means of instigating conversation on care work, practices, and norms with the campus, and larger, community.
This course was my second course taught as a UNH Postdoctoral Diversity and Innovation Scholar, an initiative of the Provost’s office that seeks to diversify the UNH professoriate on a historically and presently predominantly white campus. With both courses taught during my fellowship, I have sought to extend and explore themes and areas of interest in my research with my students in the classroom, as well as practice feminist pedagogical praxes that strive to co-produce the classroom as a space for liberatory thought. This was also my second course taught in a post-Covid pandemic world, and in a national political environment that is increasingly polarized and hostile toward critical thinking and scholarship rooted in social science research that engages feminist theory and critical race theory, both academic areas of which my scholarship and syllabi draw from and build upon.
The concept of care, I find, is something that everyone can get on board with. Everyone has people and places they care about. It is seemingly politically neutral. But, of course, nothing is politically neutral, and as with anything, the closer you examine its many facets, and deconstruct it through academic study, the more complex the act, practice, and theory of care becomes.
Source:
hooks, bell. (2004). The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. Attria Books.