Introduction

Blurb:

Who we are: Two African feminists who met at work and became friends in a changing world filled with uncertainty and despair, exploring themes around beauty, joy, power, care, community and love on the path towards freedom for ourselves, our communities and our world. This conversation series is born out of a joint project we are curating for a fellowship programme we are part of. The ShiftThePower fellowship is a mobilizing force that seeks to highlight, harness, resource, legitimize and join up new ways of “deciding and doing” that are emerging around the world under the larger umbrella of movement generosity so that it can galvanize a vision of a good society and serve as a force for genuine and lasting change. As fellows, colleagues and friends, we are collaborating on this project to document the learnings and practices around care, to reimagine collective care in multiple crises, to document joy, and to reflect on possibilities of what care should look like in the development world. For those fully immersed in liberation work at the personal and professional level; the fatigue, exhaustion and collective grief can be overwhelming. This is our contribution to the liberatory work of truth-telling and solidarity necessary to shift the narratives around power, care and activism. In a hetero-patriachal--capitalist world, care has been commodified and reduced to a capitalist commodity that is no longer a communal and holistic practice. And because of the demands of the capitalist system, we often do not have space and the time to rest and care for ourselves at the personal and collective level. Rest and reflection have become a luxury in this polycrisis world. We are living and working from crisis to crisis (Sudan to Congo to Gaza) in our varied contexts, and we do not have time and space to even reflect on how these crises are affecting us individually and as a community. We are in constant reactionary mode to injustices that are historically and systematically orchestrated. We believe it is powerful to name care as a lens through which we root our struggle, uplift each other, do this work sustainably and bring joy into our lives as activists and feminists. So we ask, Who Cares? and why it is important to center care as a way to push back against systems that are betting on our collective burnout, despair and resignation. We hope you will take this journey with us to imagine a liberated world where care and freedom are central to building institutions, coexisting with one another and working in a world constantly pushing us into despair.