For resting, for caring for yourself and your collective, and then for your communities, for all the diverse practices falling under the umbrella of this discipline, we first need to become free of the clamps of the economic instability and enable access to all the labor and social rights. It is necessary to pave the way towards care with adequate socio-political and economic principles rooted in dignified labor and social support, taking up feminist approach. Without that, practicing individual and collective care remains deprived of the essential condition for regular and continuous resting and burnout prevention, both within the movement and at the wider social level.
From 4th to 8th May, together with our collaborators and allies, we took part at a regional convening called Embodied activism and courage to rest, organized by Urgent Action Fund and Artpolis, with the local support of Reconstruction Women’s Fund. The convening, held at Vrdnik, was designated to a lately quite present topic – self-care and collective care within feminist framework – which is also a topic that, in local and regional as much as in wider circles, still requires a lot of research and reflection in order to be translated into adequate practices accessible to everyone.
Why was it important for us to meet?
Besides the obvious reasons that we missed each other during the long pandemic years, that we missed meeting new activists and exchange of information, strategies and practices, the very subject of care within activist frameworks enticed us to join, understanding (and trying to deepen our understanding) of our position regarding this subject. Considering that our approach to supporting collective care implies that the activists autonomously define what does that mean to them, considering that we clearly understand that some see resting in nature as an adequate practice of care while others see care as the peace after paying the bills, it was important to us to feel the pulse and take part in direct conversations regarding diverse manifestations of collective and individual care present in the region.
We see the inseparable matters of self- and collective care flexibly, as a term without a universal definition, practice without fixed steps, but also as a subject that, unfortunately, frequently escapes its political aspects. As a donor organizations orientated towards supporting progressive activist groups with clearly articulated politics, we consider that the support to self- and collective care has to be rooted in progressive politics. That being said, before we think about the practices of care, we think about labor rights which include the right to resting. Considering the general deterioration of labor rights, the right to resting remains at the bottom of the priority list, both for the overall population and, frequently, for the activists of feminist and other progressive movements. We think about other pre-steps – providing adequate resources for work, stability of organizational structures, fair labor distribution, safety and security of the activists… We think who has the privilege, time-wise and resource-wise, to build up on their frameworks with care practices.
When we talk about self- and collective care practices, we really primarily speak about a class privilege, inaccessible to a large part of the population, especially to diversely marginalized groups. Hence, before we talk about specific practices and their efficiency, we have to talk about the path towards making those practices in all their diversity more systemically accessible to as many people as possible. We talk about a sequence of pre-steps. There are no shortcuts.
Bearing that in mind, we went off to Vrdnik, for co-imagining how to swim in the waters of self- and collective care without getting stuck with ready-made quasi-solutions or practices insensitive to the diversity of needs and positions.
A convening without an agenda
One of the interesting aspects of this gathering was leaving out the agenda that is typically sent out to the participants before meetings. The intention behind this action was the organizers’ desire to disburden the participants regarding preparations, to disburden them regarding structure and thinking ahead what should be said at which part of the event. However, we have to acknowledge that for some participants, at least until the first hours of the convening, triggered a certain type of, at the very least, discomfort, while also imposing the question of respecting each other’s time – when we are inviting one another to events lasting for several days, while making time is a luxury in and of itself, do we also have the luxury not to define what and how we will deal with, and does this mean that we are excluding a part of women who are unable to afford making several days for the activities that are not completely clarified? – The absence of an agenda, hence, came as an experiment.
However, the following days were mainly free of such discomfort; it doesn’t come as a surprise that, as a feminist crowd, we found ways to act without a tightly structured time spent together. This left space for other type of obstacles, more tightly related to the subject of individual and collective care and resting, to overcome them together.
Long resting with obstacles
One important barrier was removed immediately, as the gathering was attended by translators for Albanian and Serbian – and conducting language sensitivity is a condition of regional talks regarding anything, including collective care. Let’s move onto the next obstacle – contextualizing and practicing resting. Have a rest, you deserved it! is in all of its simplicity quite a complicated message, due to numerous barriers, especially when it comes to women, who bear the majority of the burden of unpaid housework, as well as when it comes to activists, who are oftentimes lonely in their respective environments, in their exhausting work regarding social changes. Hence, at the beginning of the convening, we had to acknowledge some of those changes – diverse positions and contexts we come from, diverse habits, preferences and circumstances, different identities. With facilitation by Sandra Ljubinković and Bojana Glušac, we started from getting to know each other and connecting, looking for and slowly building a working atmosphere that will meet the diversity of our needs, going deeper into our personal and activist approaches. This took us further to the next live obstacle that we encountered along the way, one that would float above us throughout the rest of the gathering.
Boundaries. Personal boundaries, activist boundaries, physical and mental boundaries. Again, rooted in our diversities, all of these boundaries are at the top of priorities when we talk about the subject of care. Unison practices, those unadjusted to diverse types of boundaries, can easily turn out to be counter-productive, pushing us into additional stress instead of providing rest. Hence, this gathering required all of the participants to be highly sensitive to other participants’ boundaries and to act accordingly. Are we going to move the boundaries? Yes! But not forcefully and not without acknowledging that moving boundaries is a process.
Acknowledging our predecessors
Even though it seems like self- and collective care subjects are of a newer date, they have been diversely practiced throughout the history, and what is new is only the interest of donors and civil sector in implementing these practices in activism and related fields. Hence, a part of the gathering was devoted to reflections regarding our female predecessors, from very famous feminists to local women completely unknown to the public, who have personally inspired and moved us, and we have explored how we treat heritage left by them and how we (re)contextualize it.
Such activities contribute to reminding ourselves of the importance of feminist and activist continuity, and they are important for care subjects so we wouldn’t end up in situations of inventing and presenting these practices as brand new, while annulling the work of our predecessors. Through numerous solidarity practices, regardless of how they were named throughout the history, our predecessors have been establishing care, contributing to direct communities and society, hence, it is important to bear in mind what and how they were conducting it, to critically observe what was troubling and build up on what has been effective.
Alternative feminist economy
What perhaps sparked the most interested by the participants was the session held by Marta Musić from AWID revolving around the subject of alternative feminist economy and specific examples and models from around the world. Bearing in mind the continuous and complex crisis, economic problems, precariousness, inequalities deepened by the pandemic and wars across the globe, it is not a surprise that the invitation for imagining economically differently organized world got the activists so interested.
In this open space, where we constructed conditions without any limits, conditions for an absolute imagination, we were envisioning communities without obstacles within our groups, communities that would function by the alternative feminist economy. We presented our groups’ ideas and slowly took closed down the convening.
What have we brought from the convening?
Let’s imagine a jump cut between the scene with all of us in the same room and the scene of all of us separated in our primary environments. First, there is an image of us in a free open space imagining a world where production depends on needs unrelated to profit, where people are not conditioned by their professions but they selflessly, according to personal and collective needs, exercise diverse skills, a world where you don’t need much for a collective sustainability… And then there is a sequence of us, each in our own environment, and all of our environments are similarly defined by capitalism, neoliberalism and their oppressive impact. You need much more than unlimited imagination for creating alternative feminist economic models around here. It is kind of symbolic that these activities marked the end of the convening, because the economic reality is exactly what bothers us the most in our everyday lives, as well as the women we work with. Also, it is economic reality that determines the possible, the missing and the desired models of care about yourself and your community. Supporting this was one segment of the gathering where the representatives of Urgent Action Fund, Mama Cash and Reconstruction Women’s Fund presented the programs and principles of their organizations. During this short exchange, the activists spoke openly about types of support needed for their organizations, which require serious resourcing. This additionally brings us back to the stance that for resting, for caring for yourself and your collective, and then for your communities, for all the diverse practices falling under the umbrella of this discipline, we first need to become free of the clamps of the economic instability and enable access to all the labor and social rights. It is necessary to pave the way towards care with adequate socio-political and economic principles rooted in dignified labor and social support, taking up feminist approach. Without that, practicing individual and collective care remains deprived of the essential condition for regular and continuous resting and burnout prevention, both within the movement and at the wider social level.
So, what have we brought from the convening? Primarily, the will for further questioning how to support activists in accessing much-needed resting – not forgetting even for a minute that self- and collective care as activist practices are not substitute for systemically enabled resting and labour conditions that prevent burnout. We have brought new connections and insights in diverse views of politics of care, at diverse levels and in diverse forms. Above all, we have brought a strengthened stance that practices of collective and individual care have to be handled carefully, with respect towards diverse needs and boundaries, and with a mandatory political articulation.
We are positive that the question what have we brought from the gathering holds at least as many answers as many participants attended the event, with those answers matching more or less – because, it’s simple, each activist and each collective hold diverse understandings and needs for care.
Galina Maksimović
