Moderator: Davor Mišković
Speakers: Pirate Care / Valeria Graziano (IT), Marcell Mars (HR); Cassie Thornton (CA); Maddalena Fragnito (IT)
Streamed online: https://aksioma.org/moneylab8/session/care-solidarity-is-disobedience/
Neoliberal policies have re-organised the basic care provisions previously considered cornerstones of democratic life – healthcare, housing, access to knowledge, right to asylum, freedom of mobility, social benefits, etc. – turning them into tools for surveilling, excluding and punishing the most vulnerable, reframing the family unit as the sole bearer of responsibility for dependents. In the light of these processes, a growing wave of initiatives has been questioning the political and economic framework of care and experimenting with its collective reorganisation. On this panel, Tomislav Medak will present the research project Pirate Care that is gathering diverse self-organised care practices currently opposing the criminalisation of solidarity and prefiguring models for commoning care infrastructures. Cassie Thornton, of the Feminist Economics Department (the FED), will discuss The Hologram, a three-person health monitoring and diagnostic system practised from couches all over the world, on the phone and by many names, to produce a three-dimensional image of each participant’s physical, psychic and social health, based on one of the free, experimental care models developed by health workers at Social Solidarity Clinics in Greece during the height of the financial and refugee crisis. Maddalena Fragnito will present the experience of Soprasotto, a parent-managed kindergarten based in Milan since 2013. She will discuss the concept of “commoning care” by comparing its specificities to the market-oriented “techno-solutionist” hope on digital technologies in order to help society address the reorganisation of care needs.