RE-IMAGINING CARE
RESEARCH SPACE
Community, Care, and Social Change
Art in a Just Recovery is a local community arts project that explores community care in the context of our ongoing pandemic recovery in Guelph. Through a series of online and in-person workshops facilitated by Social Artist Mel Schambach, in collaboration with Art Not Shame and the Guelph Neighbourhood Support Coalition, participants created individual art pieces that form a large-scale digital mural. Alongside the mural project is an accompanying community-based research project, building knowledge about community care and collective artmaking. To see the mural and learn more about the project, visit the Art in a Just Recovery website.
The first CareMongering Facebook group was created in Toronto, Canada in early March 2020, as a community-based response to COVID-19. The goal of the group was to counteract fear(mongering) with care(mongering) and to organize at the local level to ensure all community members could access basic necessities, services, and resources during the pandemic. In the early stages of the pandemic, CareMongering groups were organized across the country. Our research explored this movement from a feminist perspective, tracing the spread of CareMongering, how it was practiced at a local level, and the experiences of CareMongering group members and organizers. To learn more about this project, click here.
Volunteer tourism typically involves individuals from the Global North travelling and volunteering in communities in the Global South. Volunteer tourists are predominantly young, middle class, white women. Our research on volunteer tourism explored the intersectional experiences of volunteer tourists from a feminist perspective, uncovering the complicated geographies of fear and care that influence tourists' experiences abroad and their understanding of the volunteer work they engage in. To learn more about this project, click here.
Cause-related marketing campaigns that combine consumption in the Global North with international development causes in the Global South are an increasingly popular phenomenon, which link consumption by individuals to broader social issues. Cause-related marketing positions individual consumers as capable of 'solving' development issues and caring at a distance through the simple act of consumption. Our research on cause-related marketing explored the implications of cause-related marketing for international development, specifically how it influences consumers' understanding of international development issues.
