From the nice work to the hard work: “Troubling” community‐based CareMongering during the COVID‐19 pandemic

Abstract

CareMongering is a virtually organized community-based response to COVID-19 formed in Canada in March 2020, in response to growing concerns about the pandemic. The goal of CareMongering is to care for community members, particularly those experiencing social exclusion, by organizing groups at a local level to support access to basic necessities, services, and resources (e.g., providing groceries and childcare to frontline workers). Following from feminist calls to "trouble" care, we explore the uncomfortable relations that emerged while practicing CareMongering through a case study of a group in Ontario, Canada. Using semi-structured interviews with group members and organizers and ethnographic content analysis of Facebook group activity, we examine (1) difficult interactions on the group's public Facebook page, (2) strategies used to moderate the group, and (3) the affective and embodied experiences involved in virtually organizing CareMongering. We illustrate our findings through vignettes of one of the author's experiences as a CareMongering group member and composite narratives of social media interactions. We argue that by enacting critical community care, CareMongering groups have the potential to practice care that goes beyond simply caring for or about community needs to also care with communities. The hard work of critical community care involves an intersectional, reflexive, and relational approach that addresses underlying inequalities and promotes actions aimed toward making structural and collective change.

Solidarity and mutual aid: Women organizing the “visible hand” urban commons

“…COVID‐related informal affinity groups are well‐established in many countries around the world (see also Kipp & Hawkins, 2021 in this Journal). These groups, according to Żulewski, were initially organized in those European countries that were first affected by the epidemic in order to quickly respond to the real needs of the inhabitants, before the “state machine” was launched, which sometimes takes several months to implement solutions at the lowest level, especially when it needs to adhere to the law (Żulewski, Interview).…”

Breaking the plaster: Making do with the fragility of the body

“…I look at my mother and recognize the work that women do when things are breaking up (Ahmed, 2016), literally and symbolically. Care can be hard work, involving emotional labor, anxiety, grief, satisfaction, fatigue; both for the care‐giver and the care‐receiver (Chatzidakis et al., 2020; Kipp & Hawkins, 2022). But, it is also mutually rewarding, involving empathy, attentiveness, compassion, love, generosity, reciprocity, embodied relationality, shared responsibility and affect (Diprose, 2014; Butler, 2004; Fotaki & Harding, 2017; Pullen & Rhodes, 2015, 2021).…”

“…What a word! A hard word; manifested in so many different levels and ways (Kipp & Hawkins, 2022). On the way home, I was looking at my foot puzzled, thinking of all what this trauma would temporarily distance me from.…”

“When money is more valuable than people…”: The pandemic as a call for business to care

“…Rather than limiting EOC to more proximal stakeholders, a political view of EOC holds that we can collectively mobilize care work responsibilities in order to 'care with' communities and society (Kipp & Hawkins, 2022;Tronto, 1993Tronto, , 2013. 'Caring with' draws on the moral qualities of "plurality, communication, trust, and respect" (Tronto, 2013, p. 35) and is linked with the idea of a caring democratic society in which citizens are both givers and receivers of care (Tronto, 2013).…”