Just Care: Messy Entanglements of Disability, Dependency, and Desire (D/C: Dis/color)

Just Care is Akemi Nishida’s thoughtful examination of care injustice and social justice enabled through care. The current neoliberal political economy has turned care into a business opportunity for the healthcare industrial complex and a mechanism of social oppression and control. Nishida analyzes the challenges people negotiate whether they are situated as caregivers, receivers, or both. Also illuminated is how people with disabilities come together to assemble community care collectives and bed activism (resistance and visions emerging from the space of bed) to reimagine care as a key element for social change. The structure of care, Nishida writes, is deeply embedded in and embodies the cruel social order—based on disability, race, gender, migration status, and wealth—that determines who survives or deteriorates. Simultaneously, many marginalized communities treat care as the foundation of activism. Using interviews, focus groups, and participant observation with care workers and people with disabilities, Just Care looks into lives unfolding in the assemblage of Medicaid long-term care programs, community-based care collectives, and bed activism. Just Care identifies what care does, and asks: Are some people’s needs more sacred and urgent than others? Just Care is Akemi Nishidas thoughtful examination of care injustice and social justice enabled through care. The current neoliberal political economy has turned care into a business opportunity for the healthcare industrial complex and a mechanism of social oppression and control. Nishida analyzes the challenges people negotiate whether they are situated as caregivers, receivers, or both. Also illuminated is how people with disabilities come together to assemble community care collectives and bed activism (resistance and visions emerging from the space of bed) to reimagine care as a key element for social change. The structure of care, Nishida writes, is deeply embedded in and embodies the cruel social orderbased on disability, race, gender, migration status, and wealththat determines who survives or deteriorates. Simultaneously, many marginalized communities treat care as the foundation of activism. Using interviews, focus groups, and participant observation with care workers and people with disabilities, Just Care looks into lives unfolding in the assemblage of Medicaid long-term care programs, community-based care collectives, and bed activism. Just Care identifies what care does, and How can we activate care justice or just care where people feel cared affirmatively and care being used for the wellbeing of community and for just world making? Contents Notes to Readers Acknowledgments Introduction: Needing Care and Caring Needs 1 Differential Debilitation and Capacitation: Neoliberalization of the U.S. Public Healthcare Assemblage 2 My Body Pays the Price: Necropolitics of Care 3 Affective Collectivity: Beyond Slow Death and toward Haptic Relationality 4 Living Interdependency: Desiring Entanglement in Messy Dependency 5 Bed Activism: When People of Color Are Sick, Disabled, and Incapable Postscript: What about COVID? Notes Bibliography Index "Just Care examines care as a site where the somatic, the political economy, and intersectional social oppressions manifest and materialize interactively, while it is also a vision and praxis for radically collective and affectionate ways to live and transform society"-- Provided by publisher