It was while working for the Treatment Action Campaign that I first witnessed something extraordinary, a ‘something’ that I’m still trying to figure out 15 years later. The activists working in the informal and low-income communities to raise awareness among South Africans that they had a right to AIDS care, treatment and support, transformed into a cadre of women who took it upon themselves to care for those who were sent home from over-burdened and under-resourced hospitals to die.
Community-care workers, as they are known, were absorbing the impacts of a country struggling to sync up with a global political economy while trying to address the massive inequality produced by colonialism and apartheid. Over time, it became clear to me that care workers were not only first responders to the world’s largest AIDS epidemic, but the myriad political reality generated by our unique history and emerging present. Organizing alongside unpaid carers to affect policy change, I realized that care work made stark the entanglements of political economy, poverty, health, gender, race, class, nationality, inequality and marginalization, colonial dispossession and apartheid subjugation. Care workers absorbed these entanglements, and I wanted to know why, as a society, we were willing to do nothing more than use her up.
These questions informed my Masters’s research, and in partnership with community-based care organizations, I was able to use my research process to mobilize a national campaign aimed at calling attention to the dire circumstances of, and problematic government reliance on, unpaid HIV/AIDS care work. This experience, however, left me with more questions. As my work was at the intersection of AIDS science and the material realities of women’s care experiences, my PhD used Feminist Science and Technology Studies (FSTS) to ‘ask different questions’ about care by placing indigenous responses to South Africa’s care crisis in conversation with global public health interventions and HIV/AIDS bioscience. Presently, I am expanding this decolonial FSTS analysis to think about the plethora of technologies which constellate around us in the name of care yet leave the crisis unmitigated. It is an extraordinary opportunity to pursue these questions alongside a transnational and multi-disciplinary network of local and international experts, led by Prof. Jocelyn Olcott, within the Rethinking Global Economies of Care network here at Duke University.
Gender, Sexuality Feminist Studies