How do we balance the emotions of care with the labour of care? A conversation with Kelly Dombroski

Yeah, that's such a great question because words like community and care, like motherhood and apple pie, right? Like no one is really going to disagree with them.

And also everyone interprets them in their own special way, both academically in terms of research, but also, you know, we all participate in communities and we all experience care or give care.

So we all have our own understandings of it.

And for me, that makes it just an incredibly hard, area to research because there's always people with their their own hot takes on it that aren't based on necessarily reading where we've got to in the thinking in the literature but also they're allowed to have their hot takes on it right because it's their lives they're participating in communities they're giving and receiving care so I always find it really hard to write about because you're kind of you're thinking about the literature and what has come before you and you want to engage respectfully with thinkers that have come before you but also you're writing for just ordinary people in the world whether they're academics or not who have their own experiences of community and care and there's also a lot of geographic um Diversity about what care looks like, what care means, cultural diversity.

And then I think with community as well, it becomes infused with different meanings politically that can sometimes be problematic or sometimes be like there can be a miscommunication.

Often when I'm writing about community and I'm quite positive about what community organisations are doing, And I see that sometimes as a kind of anarchist kind of take on doing something interesting or doing something meaningful for community without state intervention.

When I publish in the UK, that's read as the withdrawal of the state and it's seen as celebrating something that's problematic.

So I have to be really careful when I'm writing to make sure that I'm thinking about who's going to read this, what are their understandings of community and what are their understandings of care and how do I get them from there to what I'm trying to say in a way that they can hear me.

So for community, I follow Gibson Graham, who got this from Iris Marion Young, that it's sort of an empty signifier.

When we say community, we don't have to have a definition of it.

We don't have to be like, this is exactly what it is.

It's sort of inviting people to be in relationship with each other.

So we can talk about communities that have shared identities, but we can also talk about communities that are are becoming, are becoming around each other.

And this is what the relationship between commoning and community has for me.

We can have, same with care, it's not exactly an empty signifier, but it can have a really wide definition.

Toronto's definition of everything that is done to maintain and continue life I mean, that's quite wide.

You can fit most human activity in there.

So I think it's best to keep a wide definition of both of those and not be too quick to say, oh, it's not this.

Yeah.

And I think you've

added something else crucial there, that the word state can foreclose these quite robust and open conversations.

So I think we then need to have state and watch its mitigations.

I think that's brilliant.