April 3: The Politics of Care

Discussion Prompt

The reading on radical care was written before the COVID pandemic And yet it is eerie how much it seems to anticipate how the pandemic revealed the gaps in the social safety network. I am asking you to comment here on a passage or quote that struck you as particularly striking in terms of your understanding of our current issues of access to care. Find a quote from the essay on Radical Care and write about why it struck you.

One thing that struck me about this article was how important the act of feeding people figures in this discussion as a mode of care. The supplementary article from the New York Times written by Chef José Andrés is about his organization to provide food in the wake of disaster. You may have first learned about him in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico in 2017. In many ways, the federal government's failure and even indifference to dealing with the human suffering caused by that catastrophe was a harbinger of our current situation. How does this kind of activism reveal the gaps of care that it is attempting to fill in? What kinds of "otherwise" can we imagine? What kinds of roles should federal and local governments take? Civil society groups? Individuals? How do we understand the political aspects of allocating risk and responsibility? What issues regarding food access have you encountered during this period and what coping strategies have you practiced or observed in your community?

Don't forget to include quotes from the reading as a basis for your comments.