Caregiving as refusal in the academy

“They won't do it the way I can”: Haudenosaunee relationality and goodness in Native American postsecondary student support.

“…Despite feeling largely unsupported by their administrations, they increased the general knowledge of the institution. Moreover, their sense of responsibility required emotional labor like that described in Ambo (2018), Minthorn and Chávez (2015), and Kenny and Fraser (2012).…”

Embodying a praxis of care: The urgency of carework in supporting student activists

“…Carework is the art of retrieving, remembering, and maintaining the ways our ancestral communities have practiced care and to imagine those types of care into new forms or forms of care that do not yet exist. To practice carework with student activists is to contribute a lineage of more caring activists and a way of extending our understanding of kinship (Ambo, 2018). Carework is imperfect.…”

“…Tronto (2013), in her continued description of care, described how “caring with” reflects a political positioning of communal support and mobilization, aligning with what Grande (2015) described as caregiving—a “mutual experience of pushing back, resisting, refusing the indignities of a system intent on apprehending the end of life” (p. xvi). In that sense, care, caregiving, and carework, demonstrates a form of refusal and move away from co‐opting power and instead, works toward protecting, maintaining, and drawing toward the, “sociality that underlies all relationships, including political ones” (Ambo, 2018, p. 320). The push toward justice and transformation reveals the ways institutions, like colleges and universities, are not demonstrating care and thus recirculating into cycles of student activism.…”

“…Through this complex process, we hold each other and ourselves accountable, we are honest with one another, and we engage in vulnerability. (Ambo, 2018). Without this grounding, we similarly fold into the neoliberal production of needing outcomes and results.…”

“…For us, our engagement in carework is woven through our roles as students, staff, faculty, sisters, daughters, co-conspirators, and more. Asian American women, alongside women of color, have not only influenced the ways we conceptualize solidarity and intersectional oppression, but also have specifically pushed movements to consider the lenses of imperialism, coloniality, and settler-colonialism (Hong, 2018), reinforcing how Ambo (2018) describes carework as both about caring for one another and about caring for the land. We come into this work through a political ethic of care, a more-thanhuman approach that decenters the individual and expands the responsibility of care to the political, institutional, international, and environmental contexts (Bozalek et al, 2020).…”