Care as survival and resistance for precarious lives

Widespread economic and social precarity has made care essential to sustain life while simultaneously unremarkable due to its ubiquity. Failure to attend to care inadvertently accepts associated inequalities and ignores the potential for resistance. I explore in this paper the potential for anthropological investigations of care to overturn assumptions of care as ordinary amid precarity. Drawing on transdisciplinary anthropological, feminist, and disability studies scholarship on care and my own ethnographic work with people with disabilities and their family caregivers in Appalachian Kentucky, I argue care is best characterized as an expansive conceptual frame to understand and contest conditions of protracted precarity. Moving beyond assumptions of care and caregiving as ordinary, I theorize care as a relational, moral, and practical act; situate care within the context of neoliberalism, inequality, and repression; and recognize the persistence of resistance enacted through care practices to center efforts for justice. Care as a focus of feminist scholarship and practice must move beyond oppression. Care is an everyday means for interdependent resistance amid the conditions of precarity, offering vital recognition of personhood and worth for precarious lives. Caring labor sustains life when industrial capitalism cannot. Care persists as a way to survive and thrive amid injustice.