Just Care
Messy Entanglements of Disability, Dependency, and Desire

PB: $34.95
EAN: 978-1-4399-1990-3
Publication: Jul 22
HC: $110.50
EAN: 978-1-4399-1989-7
Publication: Jul 22
Ebook: $34.95
EAN: 978-1-4399-1991-0
Publication: Jul 22
264 pages
6 x 9
How care is both socially oppressive and a way that marginalized communities can fight for social justice
Read an excerpt from the IntroductionDescription
Just Care
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: 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?”
Reviews
“Just Care expertly weaves research and storytelling into a compellingly accessible text that challenges how we imagine systems of care in our world. Akemi Nishida makes the messiness of neoliberal care work plain through highlighting important aspects of the global care supply chain that too often go unexamined. While showing the mutually exploitative care partner relationships that systems like Medicaid demand, Nishida also provides possibilities for collective care rooted in interdependency and speculative dreaming. Just Care will be a touchstone for those of us who imagine another way forward in caring for each other on this planet.”—Moya Bailey, Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University
“Nishida’s powerful examination of the ‘care industrial complex’ situates both care workers and care receivers as entangled in a system of debilitation. Drawing on both academic theory and the lived experiences of people embedded in the system, she disrupts the binary categories of care givers and receivers and illuminates the rich and complex lives of people with disabilities. Nishida also uplifts crip wisdom that was forged from care collectives, bed activism, and just existing and that expands our imagination and offers a vision of a new radical form of care. This deeply moving account of care work is a critical intervention in prevailing debates about care, capitalism, disability, and futurity.”—Premilla Nadasen, Professor of History at Barnard College, and author of Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement
“Just Care provides a thick, textured, and sharply critical account of how care circulates in the transnational, neoliberal United States, illuminating the ongoing need for care practices that center people, not profits. Through a brilliant mix of critical theory, ethnographic research, and disability justice organizing, Nishida highlights how care can be both a site of oppression and a vibrant tool of cross-movement and cross-disability resistance. Just Care offers new vocabularies for feminist, queer, anti-racist, and anti-ableist solidarities. As multiple care crises continue to unfold—and unfold differentially—we need this book now.”—Alison Kafer, author of Feminist, Queer, Crip
Table of 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
About the Author(s)
Subjects
In the Series
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Dis/Color edited by Nirmala Erevelles, Julie Avril Minich, and Cynthia Wu
Dis/Color, edited by Nirmala Erevelles, Julie Avril Minich, and Cynthia Wu, highlights innovative books that reveal the intersections among racism, ableism, and other unequal structures and practices in U.S. and transnational contexts. The editors seek manuscripts grounded in disciplinary and transdisciplinary scholarship in the humanities and qualitative social sciences. Manuscripts may include those that address the lived experiences of people of color, those that broach theoretically informed claims, and those that involve empirically grounded perspectives about the regulatory and intersectional regimes of racial and ableist structures that shape human experience in the United States and globally. Prospective authors should contact the series editors or Temple University Press Editor Shaun Vigil to discuss their work in progress for inclusion in the series.