Time for Care

There is a stream of thought that runs through our new book “Museums and Well-being” that is interested in ideas around the politics of care. Due mostly to word length limits and a desire for our book to stay mostly on topic we make only limited tangential reference to these ideas. Yet, they are critical to our political understanding of well-being.

There does seem to have been somewhat of an explosion of books about the politics of care… of course its entirely possible we’re just noticing them as we’re looking for them! But we thought nonetheless we’d share a few book covers of those we found of interest.

It seems that much of philosophical emphasis for this renewed focus on care has come from the work being done around Social Reproduction Theory, and more specifically where this has combined with the ideas from Marxist Feminism and the work around Reproductive Labour. The historical antecedents for these ideas can be found with the International Wages for Housework Campaign, launched in Italy in 1972 under the auspices of the International Feminist Collective, who included such well known thinker-activists as Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Brigitte Galtier, and Silvia Federici. Alongside the texts from this campaign (eg), our own entry way into these ideas was through Lynne Segal’s “Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy” (who is now a member of the Care Collective), and another point of reference was David Graeber’s talk From Managerial Feudalism to the Revolt of the Caring Classes.

When we found out about the Care Collective, prior to their book coming out, we found several articles by them online quite useful. Including their take on the COVID-19 Pandemic as a “crisis of care”, and this really great discussion of What is Care? , as well as articles that critiqued Corporate Carewashing and Solidarity, and an excellent call to expand our caring imagination beyond clapping for carers.

If we accept that caring is a societal need, we can then observe that the museum has an essential function in society. Through caring for objects, people, places, and the past, the museum embodies this need. As such the well-being of museum staff is an inherently political reality for society as a whole, as any impact on the ability of our institutions to effective care for our collective cultural heritage, is a concern for us all. That these actions are predominantly undertaken in the museum by women, and that the museum is often under threat of cuts, connects the museum to the main threads of other caring professions and much of the dialogue around the politics of care.

We hope you find time to read some of the books above and we’d love to hear what you thought of them.

& if you’d like to see how we incorporate ideas around Care into our own book, well you could buy a copy here: https://routledge.pub/Museums-and-Well-being

& because these ideas are current, you might have noticed the historically unprecedented strikse by NHS frontline staff. Right now the nurses are on strike. We fully support this section of the caring class as they stand up both for their own rights, and for all of our well-being through the future of the NHS.

If you have some spare cash please do donate to the strike fund.

Victory to the Nurses!