Care-ism
Theme:
In a capitalist and neoliberal society, human life is perceived as the result of an individual's choices. This viewpoint creates an ethical system that emphasises personal responsibility as the most important factor. As a result, the responsibility for care is considered a personal and private issue, with individuals making decisions about their own care and the care of others in their lives. The project's starting point is the idea of an ethics of care based on feminist foundations, which aims to replace the utilitarian ‘homo economicus’ with the paradigm of the caring citizen.
Approach:
Based on Tronto, Sevenhuijsen, and the work of the Care Collective, I understood citizenship as the process in which citizens commit to and involve themselves in the process of care, making them both caregivers and receivers. Within this theoretical framework, I examined and challenged the idea of caring citizenship to develop a deeper understanding of how it would look. Through a quick social fiction exercise, I attempted to define "care-ism" based on the logic of capitalist consumerism. I measured the success of the exercise by the fact that my team couldn't agree on whether it was a dystopia or utopia.
Research:
In the team, my role was mostly to understand and analyse the theoretical background, conduct social fiction exercises, and analyse the political palette based on its focal point of caring actions.
Result:
As a design answer, the team proposed the Care-ism movement and its first imaginary project: the Care Net. Care-ism is a social movement that believes in the interconnectivity of the well-being of all living and non-living entities, and that caregiving and care receiving can become the most important social, economic, and cultural activity. Care-ism is basically the ideology of an over-politicised and over-ideologised way of living but is also an umbrella ideology that celebrates that people on different parts of the ideological palette care about different things and are all welcome.
CareNet is a civic tech system whose main function is to match people's care requests with others' care offers. CareNet is primarily not about promoting people to do caring acts that they haven't done before. It hopefully would inspire them to do more, but in the first place, it is about making the invisible economy visible and trying to monetarily reward it. We acknowledge that people live in the global economy, and instead of making a system that tries to replace the current one, we build it upon that. If possible, we reward people within the framework of consumerism because people and neighbourhoods who currently depend quite heavily on the so-called invisible economy of favours could take advantage of the discounts.