1. Who they are

Pedagogy of Care is an interdisciplinary research project developed by ZEMOS98 that looks into care economy, collaborative activism and open source democracy. It is funded by FundAction and Guerrilla Foundation and its main goal is to map out and give visibility to care practices and affection management by activists or other collective social agents. This participatory action research project aims to explore the way activist communities deal with care in their daily relationships. What are the unwritten rules that reproduce patriarchal relationships within activist circles? What kind of available rules could produce an effective redistribution of care among members? How can we expose the way care is being dealt with? And what tools can we develop to successfully put care in the centre of all of our relationships?

2. What they did

A knowledge exchange meeting with FundAction activists working from a feminist perspective on topics related to the care and sustainability of activist organisations. At the time of preparation of the meeting, they decided to embed it into the international encounter Culture for Solidarity that took place in Sevilla also hosted by ZEMOS98, that not only was taking place on similar dates but – more importantly – also provided an extra interest for those FundAction activists attending the meeting with its public activities. It also allowed to incorporate feminism and care as part of the encounter, and make a point about the transversal importance of these topics in the other tables closely working with cultural patterns and collective intelligence. During two days and a half, the Pedagogy of Care table within the Culture for Solidarity event reflected on ways of making care visible and socially valuable.

3. Why is this relevant to the FundAction community?

The meeting allowed the participants to talk and see how ways of care can be identified, understood, disentangled and scrutinized concretely and empirically, but the encounter also reminds us that the significance of these ways is not always shared. Care remains ambivalent or, to paraphrase Puig de la Bella Casa, “[…] like a longing emanating from the troubles of neglect, it passes within, across, throughout things. It lacks undoes, allows unraveling”. Furthermore, the outcomes of this meeting workshop will be used as a starting point for the set up of a working group on care inside FundAction community.
Links
Pictures of the event / Outcomes of the Pedagogy of Care Table
Collective Radio Show: in order to present what we talked in the different tables, ZEMOS98 organised a collective radio show in which the participants shaped their outcomes as some sort of radio format. Pedagogy of Care table is right at the beginning of the video.
Pedagogy of Care Open Paper: this is the most complete and detailed document we have, it includes many references out of the table related to Pedagogy of Care.