Pirate Care is a project that Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak have initiated with the objective to map, connect and learn together from collective practices that are emerging in response to the neoliberal “crisis of care”. Over the last couple of decades of “financialized global capitalism”, the convergence of processes that include the rollout of workfare, rollback of reproductive rights, austerity measures and criminalisation of migration have denied that vital support to many.
In response to that denial, making lives disposable, practices we have called pirate care are organising to help migrants survive at sea and on land, provide pregnancy terminations where those are illegal, offer health support where institutions fail, self-organise childcare where public provision does not extend to everyone and liberate knowledge where access is denied. Crucially, they share a willingness to openly disobey laws and executive orders, whenever these stand in the way of safety and solidarity, and politicise that disobedience to contest the status quo. That disobedience and that politicisation is why defines them as pirate care.
Pirate Care was initiated by Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak as part of their research work at Coventry University Centre for Postdigital Cultures and developed with the support o Drugo More and the European Capital of Culture Rijeka 2020.
The lecture was recorded, to watch the video on YouTube click below:
Pirate Care specifically aims to activate collective learning processes from the situated knowledge of these practices. In this, we have been inspired by the phenomenon of #syllabi, i.e. crowdsourced online syllabi created by social movements in response to situations of intense antagonism, such as #FergusonSyllabus and Gaming and Feminism syllabus in 2014, Trump 101 and Trump Syllabus 2.0 in 2015, #StandingRockSyllabus in 2016. We have written about the phenomenon in our article “Learning from #Syllabus”.
There we have promised to develop a radical pedagogy approach that would help social justice initiatives write online syllabi of their own and initiate processes of collective learning to mobilise and transfer their practical knowledge to others. And we have promised to do so in a technological framework that would allow that the syllabi, as well as the collections of texts that accompany them, be collectively created, easily preserved and maintained independent from large digital platforms. The syllabus lives on an online publishing platform developed in house by Marcell Mars, Sandpoints, allowing collaborative writing, remixing and maintaining of a catalogue of learning resources.
In this workshop I will lead participants through our examples of collective writing with social justice initiatives, tools we have developed to allow them to document their practices, and the implications on learning processes.
The workshop was recorded, to watch the video on YouTube click below: