This new issue of S&F Online presents a collection of academic, artistic, archival, visual, interview, and video interventions that forge new ground in the field of care and its intersections with racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and patriarchal and genocidal violence. For guest editors Premilla Nadasen and Alex Pittman, the task of “troubling care” is “necessarily a project of struggling over, with, and through narratives of care — that is, with inherited assumptions, frameworks, and ideologies that provide prefabricated answers to the questions of the origins and nature of the care crisis, who cares, under what conditions they care, for what and whom they care, and how to develop a liberatory politics of care.” By bringing together critical analyses and narratives of care within and against capitalism and the state, this issue reflects on, and reclaims, new approaches to care (Part 1); maternal movements outside state surveillance and violence (Part 2); and abolitionist and organizing imaginaries that build on transnational movements, association, and networks of solidarity and resistance (Part 3).
The issue emerges from the work of “Social Reproduction and the Politics of Work,” a project led by Nadasen and supported by the Center for Political Economy at Columbia University during 2023 and 2024. In collaboration with BCRW, the project produced a book salon celebrating Nadasen’s book Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Haymarket 2023) and a two-day symposium titled Care, Racial Capitalism, and Social Reproduction, in which some of the authors featured in this issue participated. This issue also features the full keynote conversation between Linda Oalican and Riya Ortiz, former and current executive directors respectively of the organization Damayan, alongside an introduction by Nadasen. At a pre-conference gathering before the symposium, speakers and project collaborators shared works in progress traversing the symposium’s theme. Alex Pittman’s contribution focused on care and the gendered and racialized politics of labor, emphasizing how feminist and queer artists approach social reproduction as a site of experimentation and world-building in their art-making. In this way, the issue represents both a culmination and a new horizon for many of the conversations that happened during the symposium and the time of the project.
“Troubling Care” robustly extends the attention to care in various lines of work at BCRW, namely abolition organizing and community-building, mutual aid, and the politics of care work. The 37th Scholar & Feminist conference in 2012, “Vulnerability: the Human and the Humanities,” for example, brought together critical approaches to care across disability and vulnerability studies, immigration, mass incarceration, and environmental justice, which this issue builds upon. Nadasen and Pittman additionally continue to model the field after significant contributions of previous issues of S&F Online, such as “Borders on Belonging: Gender and Immigration” (2008), “Valuing Domestic Work” (2009), and “Unraveling Criminalizing Webs: Building Police Free Futures” (2019). We are grateful for their thoughtful and discerning editorial guidance, and to the contributors for taking part in this field-shaping intervention.
