The Brooklyn Rail

“We take care; we must take care, because history has sharpened their edges; sharpened our edges,” Sara Ahmed writes in Living a Feminist Life (2017). The planning of CARE SYLLABUS—a public humanities and arts project—began in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and against the backdrop of murderous displays of anti-Black racism. The project emerged with a sense of urgency at a time of crisis while many aspects of daily life came to a halt and then began their pivots. Our edges were sharpened through the turning, swiveling, spinning, and whirling that was demanded of us. Within such a state of oscillation, the project took on a wayward form: part digital education resource, part activation site, part critical playground, part ongoing dialogue, part holding space. Existing in proximity to its primary institutional partners, MASS MoCA and Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, CARE SYLLABUS reads like a paratext that gains critical insight from being both within and without traditional institutional frameworks.

At its heart, CARE SYLLABUS is an invitation to examine how our care practices are shaping and being shaped by the contours of an untenable present. Through digital modules featuring intermedial content, the project embraces an interrogative form, privileging inquiry over argument as a mode of critique invested in process more than answers. Such a mode reflects the insolvency at the heart of care, what Johanna Hedva discusses in a CARE SYLLABUS interview as the endless debt of care work: “You’re never going to pay any of it back,” Hedva maintains, “…the trick here is to reframe what debt means, how it structures our understanding of autonomy, value.” Like Hedva, our other interlocutors—including Wendy Red Star, Tanis S’eiltin, Peter Morin, Kimberly Juanita Brown, Jennie C. Jones, Dell Marie Hamilton, Toby Sisson, Amanda Russhell Wallace, Constantina Zavitsanos, Caren Beilin, Rizvana Bradley, Joshua AM Ross, Tu Le, Marc Swanson, and Maggie Nelson—embrace a skepticism toward care within institutional frameworks. The different curated modules encourage us to ask:

What might it look like to exercise a careful and caring attunement to an institutional reality that acts of care are going to be acknowledged, compensated, and celebrated only insofar as they can be instrumentalized to protect the status quo, ensuring that the most vital kinds of care remain the most devalued forms of labor?

In this question, we are seeking connections between many types of “behind the scenes” work: from the precarious conditions of un- and under-compensated employee labor that institutions are exceedingly slow to address; to the emotional and intellectual labor that sustains institutions by supporting the generative, emergent, and unpolished conversations required of creative work. We are paying attention to the subsumption of “care” into corporatized practices of diversity, equity, and inclusion within cultural institutions—in which, in the incisive words of Lisa Arrastia writing on the limits of care within white institutional spaces, “every inclusive act is part of a coalition of exclusionary cultural practices.” We are concomitantly acknowledging a troubling mentality underpinning the work of cultural institutions that COVID-19 entrenched rather than changed: institutional stability is privileged as an end in itself. Such a mindset increasingly undergirds institutional strategies that ignore the beautiful insolvency of care work, creating environments in which very little is owed or is given to publics, employees, and the cultural materials for which our institutions were built to “care.”

In the ensuing burnout that arises for so many educators and cultural workers, one of the most pressing challenges that lies ahead is to find balance. Even as the pandemic allowed many of us to investigate our methods and paces of work, the tenuous terms and conditions of the present can feel endlessly unabating. When our load is lightened by the reimagining of labor and uniting of spirit, care still often has us on edge: standing at the precipice of our depleted energies, calculating what more, if any, we have to give. CARE SYLLABUS, as a result, has inspired us to return slowly to our bodies and breath, and to one another (while remaining attuned to the ways that these practices, too, can be co-opted). We are not advocating for more “self-care.” We are interrogating the ideologies of individualism that fuel cultures of supremacy; in doing so, we are exploring the ways that we meet the limits of our capacity, over and over again. We are speaking about an embrace of an inherent failure that is also a form of belonging together to the quandaries of being human. Like the variegated tones and textures found in Dell Marie Hamilton’s multimedia series “Emulsions in Departure,” where touchpoints are sites of both separation and convergence, care beckons us to liminal terrain, offering a place of suspension that is simultaneously a threshold and portal to worlds in-the-(un)making. How can we cope with not having a definitive answer to the precarity of the present? How can we transform our investment in institutions by recalibrating our sense of collectivity as a continually messy act where the lines between absence and presence, loss and gain, past and future are not neatly delineated? We are moving beyond care as a mechanism of completion to assume the unwieldy posture of care as a perpetual return—burnt out, world-weary, and open-hearted—to a horizon without end.