Description
In this article, through a care-infused and autoethnographic lens, I build upon Krystalli and Schulz’s (2022) work on ‘taking love and care seriously’ to imagine a Care Curriculum, drawn from protest-based care practices.
As a participant in the Citizenship Amendment Act protests of 2019 - 2020 in India, I found myself located in an insecure space, bounded by administrative, bureaucratic, structural, and infrastructural violences. Resisting institutions and laws that disenfranchised Muslims, Dalits, trans people, and immigrants, the protests challenged the violent conceptions of marginalized religious identities with a new idea of peace. Protest sites, such as Shaheen Bagh in New Delhi, emerged as symbols for caregiving as resistance: a radical, queer, communal, and (dis)embodied resistance to the violent masculinities of a capitalist, neoliberal, and Hindutva state.
In subsequent years, activists in the Farmers’ Protest – the largest protest gatherings in modern history – demonstrated other forms of care. From langar (communal kitchens) to songs, oral histories, stories, community libraries, and slogans, activists from historically exploited and marginalized communities reimagined collective grief, grieving, and care as not only work or labour, but as modes of political action, ingenious citizenships and transgressions that resisted the insecurity of of an uncaring state. My article views the two aforementioned Indian protest movements in light of their place-based care ethics, and asks: i) How is care redefined within the uncertain and liminal boundaries of a Third World protest? ii) (How) can such protest-based care practices be translated, taught, and communicated for diverse social movements and contexts?
By speculating about a care curriculum, I ask if we can foster safer, more hopeful, and more democratic feminist futures by tending to the needs of others; if care can be directed to stand against institutional and state apathy.
