About the Symposium
This symposium explores the contingent, emergent, resilient, gestures of care that have emerged during global pandemic times, and illuminates their entanglements with memory and art practices. While sociopolitical and economic ruptures have no doubt devastated many, we also have witnessed how communities have galvanized grassroots efforts to care for communities, while also fomenting shifts towards social justice. This symposium invites guests to contend with the everyday collective strategies of care as hybrid and interrelational spaces where experiential and transgenerational knowledge condense with the urgency and the creativity to imagine and generate diverse formats to cope, confront, or transform the ongoing precarization of life as well as rethink and shape possible futures.
The symposium interrogates the conditions that place art, memory and care to the private and consanguinity sphere, leaving the work of memory to the past, and relegating the social practice of facilitating community care as an illegible, non-artistic practice. Through contending with these intersections, we explore the transformative potential of collective strategies of care.
How have art and cultural initiatives that have emerged through strategies of care, been enacted by communities during the pandemic? What everyday care acts can be made visible through arts practice? How have structural and historic senses and orders been disrupted through collective strategies of care?
We will curate on a website a series of gestures, and traces of collective care that have emerged during the pandemic. The virtual symposium will be structured around this digital, symbolic cartography that will be available online. We invite participants to join us on a one day symposium of panels about everyday strategies of care that offer important questions, strategies, and tools regarding social justice during COVID. We explore how different initiatives have organized and cultivated collective, creative, and sensitive ways that enable communities to survive or live more liveable lives.
This symposium is supported by the Transformative Memory Network (UBC’s Research Excellence Cluster) and Social Justice Institute’s Memory & Justice Research Stream.
See the full schedule here ⇉
Themes
The (im)possibilities of self isolation: (Every day) Practices of Collective Care during pandemic times
The enforcement of quarantine on communities all over the world has also brought to the surface already existing inequalities; those who have the ability to quarantine and work from home disproportionately occupy spaces of privilege. Disabled people, working class communities, poor communities with unstable/dense housing or informal jobs that depend on every day go out to search for something; do not have the option of quarantine. What has been the response to this? How has quarantine been experienced differently by communities with different lived experiences at the intersections of class, geography, and ableism?
Undoing Capitalist logics of “essential” during the pandemic
This theme explores discourse on “Labour” during COVID: as we have witnessed, when the pandemic hit, certain forms of labour that were previously deemed “unskilled” became “essential” overnight (grocery store workers, couriers, for example). Many of these were and - despite being labelled during the pandemic as “essential” - continue to be low waged, precarious, and highly exploited labour. We also witnessed the impact of the pandemic on the arts and culture community, with the “arts” being considered “non-essential” during COVID, despite everyone being glued to a screen or television during COVID lockdowns. What labour is seen and unseen? How has COVID shifted our perspectives on the value of labour? What are some strategies to protect people and labour deemed expendable during the pandemic?
Decolonizing senses of justice and normality in pandemic times
Despite “social isolation”, movements for justice have also been galvanized worldwide. During the pandemic, already existing inequalities and injustices of the capitalist world became even more evident in a resounding way. Therefore, the “return to normality” suggests a continuation of systemic oppressions, and inequalities that existed prior and during COVID. In this theme, we hope to explore the social movements that have responded to these structural inequities that were galvanized during a time of “physical distancing”: movements against racialized, gendered, and sexual violence; movements against police brutality and state violence; movements to topple statues and rename colonial places; demands for Land back and decolonization, living wage, and safe supply.
Reflections, praxis and explorations of community struggles and resilience during pandemic times
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YOUTUBE LIVE LINK TO THE PANEL ⇉