Just Care: Messy Entanglements of Disability, Dependency, and Desire

by Akemi Nishida

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 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?

Genres: Disability, Nonfiction, Disability Studies, Medicine, Gender, History, Mental Health

263 pages, Hardcover

Published July 15, 2022

Reviews

[Hilary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nishida dispels the false dichotomy between care giver and care receiver through stories of messy interdependence and by showing how systems such as Medicaid exploit and further disable everyone involved in care work. Building upon and critiquing existing work on care, disability, feminist, and labor studies, Nishida pushes us towards care justice and a world where all receive the care they need. A great follow-up to CARE WORK if you’re looking for more formal examples of gaps in the healthcare system and the ways communities bridge them.

[L · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow … I have to go back and do a more comprehensive review of this book, but it is so funny and lucky to have stumbled across it in this moment. I am very grateful to be able to learn from somebody else triangulating these nexuses of care economy, labor, and messy care networks.
Care Justice feels like a phenomenally useful tool for discussing care, both in introducing it to people who are approaching care from different political groundings and ensuring that we see care as a collective and intersectional dynamic, negotiated both in relationships and. It also underscores the philosophical crux of care work, which intersects with so many big existential things of what we deserve and why (everything for everyone!)
Methodologically, relational analysis is at the core of how we must understand care — as a “practice,” as an “ethic,” as a relationship, and as hard work.
Although it didn’t give me answers, Just Care got at some of the big questions that often animate my thinking about care: how do we build up the networks of care we want to see in the world and destroy violent (I’d argue, carceral) care at the same time? What are the hidden logics that we use behind who is most “deserving” of care — even in spaces where that is not being determined by the imperialist state? I especially resonated with the introduction of the concept of “messy dependency,” and the reality of how unstable and in flux so many care networks are, a far cry from the romantic way I have often seen people try to introduce the idea or begin to practice them.
Lots I’m still thinking with and lots I’m grateful for. It is also encouraging to see somebody who has been so connected to dj movement work for so long hold so many of these questions and tensions and messiness.
I’m not sure if anything has ever saved my life more than dj, and especially reading Care Work, I should remember that whenever I am quick to bemoan what a book can do.
Definitely would assign in a class on care work for undergrads … not that I’m mentally planning a syllabus in my head or anything … I would never do such a thing.

[Carlin Steere · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really like the idea of bed activism being akin to planting roots — the roots growing deeper and stronger, probing further.

[Lucinda · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 ⭐️

[Chris Gabbard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review to come.

[trish · Rating 4 out of 5]

loved reading this from bed