Nishant Shah, Summer Kwong, Bowei Liu
Doing Things with Care
Photo by The Branding Co on Canva
Introduction
Care is a verb. It needs doing. It needs resources, infrastructure, and material practices to mobilise and manifest care. And yet, there is no care without speaking of it. To speak of care is to make the intention visible. To talk about care is to change the nature of our conversation. To center care, as an approach, as a lens, as an objective, as a way of doing things, is to change the narratives of what we do, who we do it for, and how we do it.
‘Doing Things with Care’ is a meditation in parts, trying to look at and understand the need for care in digital spaces. It started as a conversation and grew as an exchange between Martina Leeker, Konstanze Schuetze, and Daisy Tam, who were our Fellows in experimental authorship, helping us understand the what it means to be authoring care. Along with research, artistic practice, education, and communication scholars from universities in Germany and Hong Kong, we worked together over 2 weeks in person, through a series of interventions that framed, voiced, critiqued, and contested the existing paradigms of digital care.
The conversations, artistic workshops, research practice, and conversations through that period continue in different forms. This series is a way of attending to the archive of knowledge, provocations, and ideas that emerged during this period.
It is a way of tending to the archive of artifacts, practices, and conversations, to keep on asking the questions of why we need to talk about care, how we talk about it, and what needs to happen for digital care to be structured and offered in meaningful ways in the face of increased digital harms and violences.
‘Doing Things with Care’ invites two Masters students – Summer Kwong and Bowei Liu - to dig through this archive to show us how we do things with care, playing on the ambiguity of the phrase, we look at what we do, in the name of care, and also how do we do things carefully, so that care can be mobilized and manifested for those who are disproportionately impacted by digital violence and harm. The series is a part of an ongoing collaboration setting up The Global Care Lab, where we contemplate, critique, and co-create narratives and conditions of care.
Photo by Nicolas Rizzon (Pexels) on Canva
This blog explores the alternative ways and the importance of giving out care as a collective, while discussing the inherent interdependence within the collective.