The antitheses of radical care

Achille Mbembe; Necropolitics. Public Culture 1 January 2003; 15 (1): 11–40.

In this essay, Mbembe argues that the ultimate manifestation of authority is expressed as having the power to decide if someone (or something) will live or die and having the capacity to do something to that effect. Mbembe’s theory draws heavily on Foucaut’s concept of biopower, which he defines as “that domain of life over which power has taken control” (p.12). In this analysis, Mbembe directs his attention to expressions of sovereignty which are preoccupied with the regulation of human materiality and the elimination of bodies, individually as people and collectively as peoples. Through the lens of biopower, the function of racism is to enable a state to administer the distribution of violence and death throughout its population (and that of the world at large). Mbembe applies his analysis to the Holocaust, colonialism, slavery in the United States, and “wars of the globalization era.” He concludes that the concept of biopower is insufficient to describe and explain these phenomena, offering the term necropolitics instead. One could say that Mbembe’s focal point is the antipode of radical care. 

Bobby Banerjee, S. (2008). Necrocapitalism. Organization Studies, 29(12), 1541-1563.

Building from the work of Mbembe (2003, included in this bibliography), Banerjee advances the concept of necrocapitalism, “contemporary forms of organizational accumulation that involve dispossession and the subjugation of life to the power of death” (abstract). Banerjee focuses on contemporary imperialism, a phenomenon he places as an outgrowth of capitalism (ideologically) and colonialism (structurally). In his analysis, he examines how three different kinds of power operate to sustain and reproduce imperialism. Institutional power is represented by organizations like the IMF, WTO, and the World Bank. Economic power takes the shape of nation states and corporations. Discursive power operates in narratives of progress, backwardsness, and economic development which choke out whatever local stories people might have to tell about international development agendas and their own goals. These narratives support the violent, warful usurping of resources in allegedly underdeveloped nations. In this framework, “the fundamental feature of necrocapitalism is accumulation by dispossession and the creation of death worlds in colonial contexts.” More simply put, necrocapitalist systems generate wealth by creating and exploiting disposable people. Banerjee suggests that studying the emergence of new resistance movements may provide insight for how political power might be exerted differently in the future, ideally in a way that tends to life instead of generating so much death. In this paper, Banerjee provides a label for the phenomenon that charges us most urgently with a mission grounded in an ethos of radical care.

Anarchist conceptions of care

Connolly, C. A. (2010). “I am a trained nurse”: The Nursing Identity of Anarchist and Radical Emma Goldman. Nursing History Review, 18(1), 84-99.

In this excavation of writings about Emma Goldman (iconic figure of revolutionary, anarcho-feminist politics), Cynthia Anne Connolly, PhD, RN, calls attention to Goldman’s background as a nurse. Connolly’s analysis draws upon works written about Goldman but also includes Goldman’s autobiography where she discusses the significance of her nursing care-work in her utopian political visions. Goldman’s entry into the nursing profession was an unexpected consequence of her incarceration. As a result of this development, she had both lived experience of and eyewitness exposure to social injustice as manifested through healthcare inequality. The centrality of nursing and equity through public health in Emma Goldman’s political thought process represents a contribution to radical care discourse by providing another metaphor for care from which to draw inspiration. Nursing care-work and public health as a model for radical care might help expand conceptions of care beyond the interpersonal sphere so that it might be understood more fully as an act of tending to community health and flourishing.

Heckert, J. (2010). Listening, caring, becoming: anarchism as an ethics of direct relationships. In Anarchism and moral philosophy (pp. 186-207). Palgrave Macmillan, London.

In this book chapter, Jamie Heckert advances an understanding of anarchism as “an ethics of relationships”, and joins a polyvocal effort to articulate what the word “anarchism” actually means. For so many, anarchism is understood as a theory of negativity. Anti-oppression and all of its synonyms and derivatives are abundant in anarchist discourses. Heckert responds to the relative void of pro- in anarchist theories with the suggestion that the inverse of anarchist critiques represent a series of positive commitments. Flipping the critique of speaking for others yields a commitment to listening deeply to others as they speak for themselves; challenging neoliberal narratives of history and identity make space for a commitment to self- and community-determination; practices of resistance and mutual aid represent deep commitments to care. Heckert’s analysis expertly links the relationship between care of the self and community-care related practices and highlights the way they are mutually reinforcing. In this framing, care of the self is situated in a larger project of collective care, development, and emergence.

Verter, M. C. (2013). Undoing patriarchy, subverting politics: Anarchism as a practice of care. The anarchist turn.

Verter seeks to expand understandings of anarchism beyond one-dimensional positions that stand in opposition to states, the authority they claim, and the violent power they exert against people and the planet. In this chapter, Verter positions anarchist lines of thought as alternatives to the patriarchal, military model of violent competition that has animated western society for millenia. Verter turns to family life as an alternative social model and focuses on maternal nurturance as a model for care. Turning his sights on anarchism, Verter asserts that nurturance is at the core of anarchist philosophies. This is particularly evident in the salience of mutual aid in anarchist discourse. The practice of mutual aid emerges from understandings of human interdependence advanced by prominent figures like Peter Kropotkin. Kropotkin was deeply critical of capitalism, seeing it as the mechanism by which states took shape around the whims of the wealthy at the expense of the poor. Kropotkin criticized states for the way they attempted to justify their existence (and presumably authority) through interference with emergent expressions of mutual aid and the establishment of state sanctioned charities and institutions of public welfare. Verter’s contribution to the radical care discourse points to the need to look beyond state institutions for robust demonstrations of radical care.

Radical care and pedagogy

Latif, A., & Jeppesen, S. (2007). Toward an anti-authoritarian anti-racist pedagogy. 2007) Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations/Collective Theorization, 288-300

In this co-authored exploration, Sandra Jeppesen and Ashar Latif argue for an anti-authoritarin and anti-racist pedagogy. Identifying herself as a white person, Jeppesen argues that exposure to anti-racist texts, particularly in the form of anarchist zines, is a fruitful pathway for white people to develop a capacity to see racism and experience feelings of-transracial-empathy, both of which are necessary in order to develop an anti-racist praxis. Latif grounds calls for anti-racist education in the claim that anti-racist pedagogy must also be anti-authoritarian. He questions whether anti-racism can be taught at all and insists that anti-authoritarian pedagogy positions everyone as a learner. Zines, as an unregulated, highly personalized form represent a departure for what is typically considered acceptable learning material in academic spaces and expand limiting conceptions of authorship, thus enabling new voices to exert influence in discursive space. Following from Mbembe’s analysis of the function of racism in necropolitical structures and Banerjee’s presentation of the embeddedness of racialized necrocapitalist structures in our global society, eradicating racism is a central component of any collective-care project and education an integral facet.

Thompson, B. (2017). Teaching with tenderness: Toward an embodied practice. University of Illinois Press.

In a precious and personal book, Becky Thompson advances an embodied pedagogy of tenderness drawing from her experiences as a university educator. For Thompson, tenderness describes “an embodied way of being that allows us to listen deeply to each other, to consider perspectives that we might have thought way outside our own world views, to practice a patience and attention that allows people to do their best work, to go beyond the given, the expected, the status quo. Tenderness makes room for emotion; offers a witness for experiences people have buried or left unspoken; welcomes silence, breath, and movement; and sees justice as key to our survival” (p. 1). In each chapter, she offers anecdotes from her work as a university professor that illustrate the range and depth of experiences that are made possible through a pedagogy of tenderness. 

Thompson offers this text as a guide, providing examples of rituals and activities she has brought into her own teaching practice as she deepens her tenderness work. Thompson grounds her vision in the recognition that there is so much pain living in our bodies related to the traumatic histories(and current realities) we are often expected to discuss with academic airs of neutrality in university classrooms. There is so much violence in history books. The pedagogy of tenderness she advocates for in this book is an attempt to acknowledge and respond to the fact that trauma and learning are equally embodied experiences. Developing a critical awareness of the violence woven through our social fabric is not without hazard or pain but is a necessary step towards joining collective projects of liberatory transformation. Thompson’s book provides actionable tools and points of reflection for educators who are interested in integrating a more tender, radically caring approach to their critical pedagogical goals.

Hey everyone, my unessay is on instagram. You shouldn’t need an account to access it since my profile is public.

Unessay: https://www.instagram.com/p/CO1B0_IjizQ/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

The statement I read from last week is below.

can empathy be taught?

what does care look like in a school system driven by capitalism? can they even co-exist?

how can care shift from an individual act/practice to a collective project?

—

I would argue that empathy can be learned, but not necessarily taught. I would also argue that the ideological pillars of (necro)capitalism interfere with this learning process and disincentivize altruistic, caring behaviors that have the potential to contribute to our empathy-learning-by-doing. Individualism negates the truth of our interdependence and casts care as an interpersonal exercise, a thing one does for another, rather than an act of collective-preservation.

The animating spirit of capitalist formations is often fundamentally opposed to life (human, animal, plant, or otherwise). Care, behavior I define as life preserving, affirming, and honoring, cannot exist in such a system except as an act of resistance, as a challenge to the savage individualism that animates American society. Looking outside of capitalism for relational frameworks that center care has always led me to anarchist (and anarcho-adjacent) theorists.

As a teacher, the larger questions that guide my intellectual journeying always bring me back to questions of classroom practice and praxis. In searching for lines of anarchist thought that render the contours of anti-oppressive pedagogy more clear, I have found recurrent references to gardening as a metaphor for education. Considering the difference that exists between “aesthetic care” and “authentic care” has led me to wonder if instead of looking to gardens we might instead consider what forests might have to tell us about teaching and what it would mean to be a steward instead of a gardener.

We need to break free of the trellis, to climb wildly up a tree, to be in authentic community, to be embedded in networks of authentic care and mutual dependence. We need to be in the forest. Forests are wild, abundant places. They are robust and adaptable in proportion to the extent to which they are diverse and intergenerational.

At best, the education system we have can support learning spaces that feel much more like gardens than they can ever feel like forests. While I work towards disassembling the garden walls, I am listening to what my plants have to tell me about empathy, care, and growth. The images that follow represent the wisdom they have shared with me.

Lessons in Radical Care: (as told by houseplants) is presented as an instagram story. The graphics are largely text-based with botanical motifs throughout. The textual content draws parallels between caring for plants and enacting care in the classroom.

References for annotated bibliography

Bobby Banerjee, S. (2008). Necrocapitalism. Organization Studies, 29(12), 1541-1563.

Hayworth, R. (ed.) (2012). Anarchist pedagogies: Collective actions, theories, and critical reflections on education. PM Press.

Heckert, J. (2010). Listening, caring, becoming: anarchism as an ethics of direct relationships. In Anarchism and moral philosophy (pp. 186-207). Palgrave Macmillan, London.

Latif, A., & Jeppesen, S. (2007). Toward an anti-authoritarian anti-racist pedagogy. 2007) Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations/Collective Theorization, 288-300

Mbembe, A. (2008). Necropolitics. In Foucault in an Age of Terror (pp. 152-182). Palgrave Macmillan, London.

Thompson, B. (2017). Teaching with tenderness: Toward an embodied practice. University of Illinois Press.

Verter, M. C. (2013). Undoing patriarchy, subverting politics: Anarchism as a practice of care. The anarchist turn.

I connect deeply with the story Sonya Horsford tells of her intellectual journey with the question of integration. I had a similar experience as a first year doctoral student and now find myself both deeply critical of most integration discourse as well as fundamentally uncertain as to what sort of structural role government of any scale (city/state/federal) ought to play in the administration/management/provision of education. When I read the phrase “education is the practice of freedom” in Horsford’s piece in Education Weekly I had to pause to take in the magnitude of my agreement with the assertion. 

True education is the practice of freedom but what happens in schools is something else all together. I am enrolled in Decolonizing Education this semester and we’ve recently been engaging with Sylvia Wynter’s scholarship (and work building upon it) pertaining to the narrow concept of being human emerging from the epistemological cradle of “Western thought”. We read a piece by Desai and Sanya (2016) that called for decolonial pedagogies that would make space for and legitimize multiple ways of being human so as to get out from under the thumb of racism/cisheteronormativity/sexism/etc. When Horsford asked it could even be possible to create a shared vision of education in the US, I immediately thought about the epistemological faultlines that exist in society. Developing such a shared vision requires deep exchanges and real communication. This is bigger than the political, this is foundational philosophy. 

    What the United States  has gotten away with calling a public education system is actually a labor funnelling system. It is a system designed to support an economic agenda that predated it and is dependent upon it. The labor funneling system takes shape around the values and priorities animating our economic system. The centrality of racial capitalism in the movements of our economy (and the government that nurtures it) means that it will always rear its head in schools.  Like Horsford, “I continue to wrestle with what constitutes the best type of learning environment for young people in a society that does not value their intellect, culture, or humanity” and I don’t trust our (white settler-colonial) government(s) to provide an answer. 

    To say that integration is a solution rests on so many assumptions. I appreciated Horsford’s critique of integration and had a long nod after reading her say that she “[questions] how we as a nation make assumptions about the racial composition of our schools, which have implications for how integration is defined and what problem it aims to solve…And whose school integration is it?” In speaking about contemporary white integration-evangelists, Horsford notes that they “continue to advance a vision of equity and diversity grounded in the belief that if the Brown decision declared separate schools inherently unequal, the way to address the problem of educational inequality is through racial integration.” This is particularly significant in light of the interest convergence analysis of the Brown decisions. Seeking moral legitimacy during the Cold War, the United States was under immense pressure to appear to respond to the grievous violence and injustice that had defined relations between Black and White people from the country’s inception. It would seem that integration has always been a bit of a vanity project for many.

    But what good is integration if White folks keep white-folking? Like DuBois said “We shall get a finer, better balance of spirit; an infinitely more capable and rounded personality by putting children in schools where they are wanted, and where they are happy and inspired, than in thrusting them into hells where they are ridiculed and hated.”

When Horsford asked “does the Black child need integrated schools?” I just wrote: No. The Black child does not need integrated schools. What good is integration in the presence of racial animosity and no institutional commitment to interrupt and redress racial harm or capacity to fully see, affirm, care for, and educate Black children? I’ve been following many of the @blackatXYZprivateschool accounts on instagram and it is a catalog of (largely emotional) violence enacted against Black children who were wedged into PWIs in the name of integration/diversity/inclusion. With every story I read, the more I realize how deep my rageful critique of organizations like Prep for Prep go. This is a much longer rant but the tl/dr of it is “If board members and donors were as invested in dismantling structural inequality as they were in putting Black and Brown kids in private school we might actually get somewhere.”

There is a refrain throughout Jeff Duncan-Andrade’s talk that looms heavily over my head as I consider our collective fate (as a nation//as a species). At many points he focused his audience on the precipice of an enormous if..

“If we are aiming to be a pluralistic and multi-racial society..” If.. If.. If.. He told us to avoid getting into ideology debates with amoral people. That it will always lead to a stalemate. So what do we do with a public education system hamstrung by the knotted purse strings of amoral people who are fully disinterested in cultivating a pluralistic and multi-racial democracy? Voting is the answer you say? I’ll be generous and say that answer might merit partial credit. Andrade himself said that we cannot “policy our way out of this.” This talk had me thinking back to the first days of my doctoral program when my cohort grappled with the philosophical/ideological roots of our public education system. What value is Andrade’s conjecture in the context of a public education system that has many different rationales baked into it? How can we engage with this enormous “if” when there seems to be such a national unwillingness to truly sit with the history of how state sponsored education has always been an instrument of stratification and genocide in this country?

That history necessitates the kind of critical consciousness Ginwright and Cammarota are calling for in their work in order to help children engage in educational institutions steeped in toxicity in ways that promote their healing and capacity for community and civic engagement. Cammarota (2011) tells us that social justice youth development “requires the healing of youth identities by involving them in social justice activities that counter oppressive conditions preventing healthy self-identification. Youth also attain empathy for those suffering beyond their immediate communities. The three-step approach of self, community, and global awareness operates to expand youth consciousness to higher levels of social criticality and human compassion. The intended outcomes are young people with consciousnesses that facilitate academic achievements and social activism.” But why is engagement in school the goal? Can we imagine possibilities for young people beyond the cultural artifact of “schooling” as we know it? I understand that he has to fit his scholarship into someone else’s imagination.. but.. what would it mean to stop using “academic achievement” as an indicator of an “intervention’s” value? I appreciate that Ginwright focuses more broadly on youth and community well being in his work and am reminded of Andrade’s reminder that “we measure what matters.”

Though I am a teacher and a student, academic achievement doesn’t matter to me. I don’t want to track grades. I want to track hope. I want to track joy. I want to track curiosity. I want to track freedom. I want to track commitment to interrupting oppression. What does the world look like when these are the things we track? What do young people’s days look like when these are the things that matter? What does our society look like when these are the things we attempt to quantify and assess?

I teach the Yosso text in my Social Foundations of education class. In discussion, my students often focus on linguistic capital because many of them have experience with their home language practices being devalued in most educational spaces. They feel excited by the opportunity to discuss what it means to disrupt assimilationist pressure felt by students and teachers of color. I hope the impact of those conversations goes beyond our class time.

I found the way Rodela and Rodriguez-Mojica text engages with the idea of resistant capital to be stretching beyond the definition advanced by Yosso. The examples given were of two women who resisted the gender norms of their home cultures in pursuit of their own educational and professional goals. This feels like a misrepresentation of Yosso’s application of the term. Because this article sought to make sense of the experiences of the participants through a cultural lens, I feel like the salience of gender was understated in relation to culture and ethnicity in the educational and professional realities faced by Teresa and Josie. Particularly, I wondered how much of the “directness critique” faced by one of the women was really about about her stepping outside of white norms of femininity than about anything inherent to her latinidad. I didn’t get the sense the men faced similar challenges.

I also found myself disappointed by Yosso’s framing of cultural capital being used in service of survival and resistance. Indeed the Black voices in her discussion highlight that these forms of capital support the survival and advancement of a people. That imagination is far beyond the limits of “survival” and “resistance”. Like Bettina Love said.. we want to do more than survive.

Throughout the time I spent reading Rivera-McCutchen’s 2020 case study of the leadership of *Byron Johnson*, I kept returning to the phrase “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” In my experience, the vast majority of educators are motivated to enter the profession quite nobly. Overwhelmingly, teachers want to do something positive for society through their work. Unfortunately, a caring heart is insufficient in transformative approaches to education that center social justice. The radical care framework demonstrated through Johnson’s leadership combines the power of a caring heart and the application of hope and social/political strategy to enact material changes that influence students’ and teachers’ capacity for success. I appreciated the insight this article provided on Johnson’s reflective process to make it clear how he came to understand that his teachers needed more than encouragement from him and in fact needed material resources to successfully implement the vision for the school. When teachers were resisting pushes from Johnson to further tweak their teaching practices, Johnson initially responded by emphasizing his belief in their capacity to be successful. It was only after the meeting that he realized that he had to give his staff more than positive messaging and got to work assembling curriculum resources for them. Similarly, students need more than caring words of encouragement from their teachers. They need teachers who understand the material and structural realities that shape their students’ lives and provide meaningful support for them to achieve various academic and personal goals.

In a totally unrelated on-going conversation with myself, I found myself spending a lot of time thinking about the notion of deservingness as it relates to students and access to different kinds of learning experiences. In a commodified education landscape, high-quality, safe opportunities for intellectual development are often positioned as luxuries. It’s a sore point and I need to find more productive words for exploring my ideas here.

I am an educator at an organization that is purportedly invested in addressing racial educational inequality despite not mentioning in their mission statement. I am reminded of Ladson-Billings and Tate writing in 1995 that racial educational inequality is to be expected in “a racialized society in which discussions of race and racism continue to be muted and marginalized” (p. 47). Internally we may acknowledge that the overwhelming majority of students we serve are Black and host anti-racism trainings for instructors but will never properly situate our work in the context of the racialized illnesses plaguing our education system like segregation and curriculum steeped in whiteness. Despite its absence in the mission statement, race and racial diversity is central to the website’s visual story

When I think about this work and this organization tossing around terms like “anti-racism” and “critical race theory”, I am pushed to think of Dixson and Anderson (2018) calling for critical race theory to become more than an intellectual movement. My organization is doing the work on some level but I wonder about the understanding people have about what Critical Race Theory really has to say about our work and how we do it. I appreciate Dixson and Anderson seeking to establish some concrete boundaries around what Critical Race Theory is because maybe, just maybe, it might be possible for organizations like the one I work for to get a handle on how to employ more racially critical lenses on program development and implementation.