This reading list brings together titles that can help us to reconsider how we relate to one another, and to take caring action.
Care navigates spaces that are emotional, social and political. There are many different things to say about care, and many different ways to say them. This selection of texts from different voices offer reflections and perspectives that contextualise the thinking behind my project for Radio Ballads. — Helen Cammock
How can we speak, write, and think, of care? Held in and enacted through our bodies, it is something we all experience differently — and yet, care connects us as interdependent beings. To navigate this complex and vital field, many practitioners of care draw on knowledge, ethics, and approaches developed in other disciplines. Artists, social workers, nurses, therapists, doctors, educators, and activists often learn from one another’s work.
As part of her contribution to the Radio Ballads exhibition, artist Helen Cammock offered a book table. Here, visitors could sit and read titles which have influenced Cammock’s practice, and her three-year collaborative project with people living in Barking and Dagenham. This reading list invites you to discover new lines of enquiry into how we relate to one another, and new frameworks for caring action.
Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
María Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care
Madeleine Bunting, Labours of Love
Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death
The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto
Lisa Cherry, Conversations That Make a Difference for Children and Young People
Each of us has been shaped by the care of others. From the first touch of the midwife’s worn hands as she pulled you into the world, your life has been sustained by a long catalogue of people who have nurtured and supported your development and well-being… Ahead lie more experiences of being cared for, possibly from those you love and certainly from many strangers, whom you may completely depend on for your basic needs… No one can afford not to be interested in care. — Madeleine Bunting, Labours of Love
Ed. Laura Erickson-Schroth, Trans Bodies, Trans Selves
Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble
Sonja M. Brown Givens, Underserved Women of Color, Voice, and Resistance: Claiming a Seat
at the Table
Stuart Hall and Mark Sealy, Different
Bessel Van Der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score
Audre Lorde, Your Silence Will Not Protect You
Iain Mackenzie, Resistance and the Politics of Truth
Ed. Danny Morrison, Hunger Strike
Care is omnipresent, even through the effects of its absence. Like a longing emanating from the troubles of neglect, it passes within, across, throughout things. Its lack undoes, allows unravelling. To care can feel good; it can also feel awful. It can do good; it can oppress. Its essential character to humans and countless living things makes it all the more susceptible to conveying control. […] Care is a human trouble, but this does not make of care a human-only matter. — María Puig de la Bellacasa (Matters of Care)
Dan Peel, The Story of the African American Fight for Justice and Equality: The History of The Civil Rights Movement
Reiland Rabaka, Civil Rights Music: The Soundtracks of the Civil Rights Movement
Jayneen Sanders, Let’s Talk About Body Boundaries, Consent and Respect, illustrated by Sara Jennings
Reilly Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity
Susan Stryker, Transgender History
Mickey Vallee, Sounding Bodies Sounding Worlds
Jean Watson, Nursing: The Philosophy and Science of Caring
We have been encouraged to feel and act like hyper-individualised, competitive subjects who primarily look out for ourselves. But in order to thrive we need caring communities […] because issues of care are not just bound up with the intimacy of very close relationships, such as family and kinship. They also take place in the environment we move through… — The Care Collective (The Care Manifesto)
