panel 2Matters of Mutual Aid: Caring Assemblages and Collective Action
Ephemeral Islands: Matters of Care and the Weaving of Collective Worlds in the Mediterranean
Myrto Karampela-Makrygianni
The Mediterranean Basin, defined and restricted by its own watery boundness, embodies the mesocosm of a “damaged” planet facing the concatenation of multiple crises. Its thick surfaces contain much more than water alone: highly colonized, politicized, appropriated, and instrumentalized, the Mediterranean embodies all the fragilities and urgencies that characterize living in the 21st century. In its deep – and often intentionally obscured – space, the notion of coexistence is constantly re/negotiated through overlapping (re)territorialization processes, accelerated climatic, material, and geological transformations, as well as complex interactions between human and more-than-human assemblages. As the climate crisis shifts the focus from the land to the sea, the question of care and its aesthetics become central for the establishment of a counter-paradigm for the worlding of the ocean: a paradigm that opposes the prevailing practices of domination, alienation, expulsion, and colonization that accompany anthropogenic practices and unitary “truth claims” typical of the capitalist state regime nexus.
In this light, it becomes paramount to develop experimental methodologies, alternative conceptualizations of care, and cartographic practices that bring about more desirable worlding dynamics. The present paper addresses these concerns from both conceptual and designerly perspectives: firstly, it critically re/maps the Mediterranean Basin by painting its fragmentary portrait as a material (re)configuring of interconnected and conflicting political, cultural, historical, and environmental forces, while simultaneously revealing traces of immanence and resistance. Secondly, it deploys practices of care for the creation of a common “grounds” where contextual encounters and entanglements “weave” together existential and material threads into a rich texture of synergies, tensions, and contradictions, resulting in the emergence of new subjectivities and more-than-human agencies capable of co-evolving on a “damaged” planet. To do so it focuses on the ephemeral island formations of the Mediterranean seamounts as speculative (re)fabulations that hold in their terra nulla legal status and in their inherent unknowability the ability to induce caring types of knowledge. Understood as prototypical “in-between-scapes” and as assemblages of neglected things, stories, relations, and worlds, seamounts blend conventional dichotomies such as nature/culture, zoë/bios, human/non-human, or subject/object, into reformulations of onto-epistemological import, thus weaving an affirmative-repairing model not only for the urbanization of the ocean but generally for the cohabitation of the “damaged” planet.
Myrto Karampela-Makrygianni has graduated cum laude from the MSc at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft. Her areas of expertise are guided by her research on more- than-city and more-than-human urbanization, and on critical cartographies as a medium of new materialism worlding practices. The proposed paper is based on her graduation project “The Sea as Island: Borderscaping the Mediterranean Basin,” in which she uses the case of the Mediterranean to critique prevailing worlding paradigms and to investigate processes of knowing-in-becoming and alternative forms of co-existence between human and more- than-human assemblages founded on practises of care.
Utopias of Care: The Powers of Mutual Aid and Collective Action. A Case Study of the Barcelona-based Collective Madrecitas
Laura Del Vecchio
The present work takes the case study of the Barcelona-based collective Madrecitas as an inspiration and starting point to delve into the powers of mutual aid and collective action as storytelling practices to build utopias of care. Madrecitas is a political collective formed by migrant mothers that started their activism in 2020 in order to fight for recovering the custody of their children. By taking Madrecitas’s activism as the main source of knowledge and experience, this work compares different types of discourse related to the ethics and politics of care in the city of Barcelona and the Spanish State, observing how discourses (and storytelling as well) shared by public institutions do not match the reality lived by those affected by their programs. While exploring the singularity of the Madrecitas collective, their knowledge and experience serve as a solid statement to assess how colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, and cisheteropatriarchy deeply intervene in the elaboration of public policy and dynamics of social services. Instead of focusing on the social, cultural and economic hindrances faced by Madrecitas’s members throughout their daily routines, this work pays particular attention to the transformative potential of their actions as a political group, relating their testimony with additional academic resources drawn from abolitionist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial practices. Together with the theoretical framework of this study, in collaboration with Madrecitas, a utopian narrative was written with the intention to put name to the nameless things and to potentially lay the basis for the construction of new worlds powered by mutual aid and collective action.
Laura Del Vecchio (she/her) is a translator and editor, interested in the aspects that interfere in the conception of the political, social, and cultural surrounding our way of thinking as humans. Laura has contributed to developing methodologies and participated in research groups focused on emerging technologies, collaborating with third-sector institutions and companies such as UNESCO, the Austrian Economic Chambers (WKO), armesuisse, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, BNP Paribas, and many others. Laura published articles and collaborated with Uol Tab, Up Future Sight, Foro Social de Economías Transformadoras, Trop.soledad, tech Detector, and La Directa. Currently, she is a student in the Master of Construction and Representation of Cultural Identities at the University of Barcelona, in the branch of globalization, migrations, and alterity, focusing her research on the concepts of responsibility and commitment within post-human feminist theory and with an emphasis on the ethics and politics of care.
Difficult Reciprocities: Matters of Care in a State Secondary School
Junn Kato
This exploratory study takes permission from the excessive potential of Fisher and Tronto’s definition of care, to assemble caring research from care ethics theorising, Actor-Network Theory, and Feminist New Materialisms. Set in an Australian state secondary school serving a community affected by poverty, the study traces matters of care and concern raised by four young people preparing for their senior years of secondary education. Following María Puig de la Bellacasa’s critique of Latour, a method has been developed that seeks new ways to care. The study traces assemblages which gather at sites young people say matter to them, gathering in a cast of actants including coffee mugs, unauthorised murals, guinea pigs, budget guidelines, earbuds, curricula and a host of other entities, some surprising and some mundane. By tracing more-than-human caring assemblages, the study sought to conceptualise care separately from liberal ideologies that inform state education. In doing so, “vibes” as continuities of bodies, spaces, and materials, emerged through the concept of umwelt as articulated in the theorising of Elizabeth Grosz.
Vibes drew attention to two school spaces, Artcave and the restorative room, whose caring architectures assembled them as sensors, or means by which the school as an entity feels, and becomes responsive. Tracing actants through these entities, and then what they go on to do, provided an opportunity to think critically about difficult reciprocities, being mindful of Frans Vosman’s warnings regarding romanticising care. In this study, in order to be cared-for, there was a silencing of complaint, a silencing that was corrosive of institutional trust. The term “difficult reciprocities” highlights limitations of liberal ideologies inherent in care as a compensatory act, and indicates hidden costs in the assumed unequalness of liberal care, limiting its potential for justice.
Junn Kato (he/him) is a final year PhD candidate at the Queensland University of Technology, and Deputy Principal at a state secondary school in Queensland, Australia, with thirty years of experience in Queensland state schools. Junn’s doctoral thesis seeks to apply the ethics of care to research into socially just public schooling practices using methodology informed by Actor-Network Theory and Feminist New Materialisms. Together with Jessica Leonard, a fellow doctoral candidate working in the tertiary sector, Junn co-leads a small online reading group focusing on care ethics research, specifically applied to education contexts. When he grows up, he would like to explore the possibility of becoming a practitioner-researcher in public schools, as a way of addressing the lack of theory-informed creativity in the global school improvement agenda, particularly as it pertains to socially just schooling.
Junn’s relevant work as an administrator includes a commitment to socially just schooling through employment partnerships with industry bodies, restorative justice, as well as university transition programs for students at schools serving communities affected by poverty, especially for students interested in teaching and nursing. In his spare time, Junn gardens with his partner Jenny on their acreage outside Brisbane where they experiment with the permaculture principles that inform Jenny’s work as a permaculture designer and educator.
Location
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
Contact info Louis van den Hengel
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