Care-full Collectives and their Care Practices

Care-full Collectives and their Care Practices

My thesis explores the intricate relationship between care, collaboration, and networks within various collectives, delving into my experiences in Team YUVAA, Living Labs Network and Forum, Design Beku, and the InterCity Covid Apps Network. Through thick descriptions and reflective analysis, it observes diverse care-giving roles and proposes alternative organizational structures rooted in mutual aid principles.

Link to source Open Dissertation in Full Screen

Caring in Networks: Reflections on Archetypes and Axioms of Collaborative Practice

My thesis journey took me from the historic streets of Bidar to the urgent digital spaces created during the COVID-19 pandemic, exploring the invisible threads that hold communities of practice together. Throughout this work, I was been guided by a central question: How do we reimagine different modes of collaborative networks that take care of their communities and their value systems? It was also written by a far less cynical version of me, which is probably the only way I would have seen these connections.

The Journey Through Networks of Care

My research began in Bidar, where I worked with Team YUVAA (Youth United for Vigilance, Action and Awareness) and Deccan Living Labs (DLL). These networks were already engaged in preserving local knowledge and cultural practices, from the songs of the Kumbhara community to the spiritual performances of the Bhooteru. When COVID-19 disrupted this place-based work, I shifted to collaborating with fundraising with Team YUVAA and creating resources and information materials for communities navigating the pandemicDesign Beku and the InterCity COVID Apps Network (ICAN).

What struck me most was how different these networks were in their formation, structure, and practices, yet they shared common threads in how care manifested among their members and extended to their communities. As Sara Ahmed might say, these networks demonstrated how “some bodies become depleted because of what is required to go somewhere, to be somewhere, to stay somewhere.” The fragility of these collaborative spaces became a site not just of vulnerability but of strength.

Methodological Reflections: Embodied Learning Through Making and Being

My approach drew deeply from feminist geography and autoethnographic methods, embracing what Liz Bondi describes as “an oscillation between observation and participation.” Rather than pursuing a traditional problem-solution thesis, I chose to produce multiple smaller outcomes, outputs, practices, and reflections through participation and collaboration. This methodology crystallized in describing care through “micro-outputs” - experiences of doing, being, and making that helped me articulate care in networks:

  • Micro-understandings: Epiphanies that emerged without explicit making or practicing
  • Micro-practices: Instances of putting care into practice
  • Micro-makings: Artifacts that I created to support network activities, like the payment system for Design Beku volunteers or the COVID resource spreadsheets for Pune, which taught me how technological tools can embody care principles.

These micro-outputs became my carrier bag, to borrow from Le Guin, collecting fragments that collaged together a richer understanding of care than a single linear narrative could provide for me.

Archetypes of Care: The Roles We Play

Through this journey, I identified three archetypes of care practitioners that people in these networks ephemerally embody across these networks:

The Maintainer-Repairer

The maintainer-repairer is essential to a collective’s longevity, doing both the visible work of creating excitement and the invisible work of nurturing projects. I witnessed this in Khansaab’s work from Bidar, the “keeper of public memory” who maintained a collection of historical artifacts despite his growing age and concerns about the future of his life’s work.

I also experienced the emotional toll of maintenance during the pandemic, when I worked on COVID resources for Pune until my body literally couldn’t continue. As one grandfather from the Valmiki Samaj community told me about their choral singing: “If there’s a lot of people singing, when one person’s voice falls, another can take its place.”

The maintainer-repairer is well aware of the fragility of what they maintain and repair and they choose to put their efforts into holding it together

The Translator-Weaver-Facilitator

The translator-weaver-facilitator connects ideas, concepts, struggles, people, and practices across differences. This role became vivid to me while working with Ruksana ma’am, translating her Urdu stories. I realized translation wasn’t just about language but about facilitating dialogue where universal claims to knowledge are replaced by partial viewpoints.

In Naveen’s workshop, I practiced this role when helping students navigate language barriers. I discovered how obstacles and mistakes can often become “points of divergence” rather than endpoints, creating space for new perspectives. Even objects can serve this role – like the clay that became a medium of translation between the songs of the Kumbhara and Bhooteru communities during a participatory workshop.

The Translator-Weaver-Facilitator understands the different languages of interoperation and interdependence and works to strengthen these bridges.

The Storyteller-Archiver-Guide

The storyteller-archiver-guide preserves knowledge and practices while making them accessible and relevant. This archetype emerged clearly during the “Co-Creating Local Knowledge Network” project in Bidar, where we worked to document and share singing and storytelling practices. Rather than creating dead archives, this role involves activating knowledge – making it a living thing that communities can engage with. I found myself thinking of Brom from the book Eragon, the storyteller who shared histories of dragon riders not just as tales but as possibilities for alternative futures. This role becomes particularly vital in times of fracture, showing us that our current reality is not the only possibility.

The Storyteller-Archiver-Guide understands how history can distort, reveal or even manifest a future, the stories of yore give strength, vision and meaning.

Axioms of Practice: The Principles That Guide Us

Beyond these archetypes, I identified three axioms that guided care practices across these networks:

Fragility

These networks embraced fragility not as a weakness but as a core strength. But I came to see that this acknowledgment of fragility created room for honest failure, divergent paths, and more sustainable collaboration. The move from liability to accountability was particularly striking. In the app I created for volunteer payments, the honor system was the operating principle – volunteers weren’t held liable but assumed accountability because they understood they were part of something fragile.

Counter-hegemonic Practices

Care in these networks often manifested as resistance to dominant systems and norms. In translating COVID information materials, Naveen pointed out how I needed to “de-sanskritize” the Google-translated Kannada text, revealing how colonial and caste influences shape even our language tools. The decision in ICAN to stay small-scale rather than “solve” problems through technological solutionism reflected a humbler approach to technology. These networks constantly questioned dominant narratives about efficiency, scale, and progress.

Relationships

Perhaps most fundamentally, these networks questioned normative relationship structures. I was bewildered when Shreyas added me to the Living Labs group after just one week in Bidar – but later understood how relationships formed based on personal connections, bandwidth, and shared values rather than rigid hierarchies or credentials. These fluid relationships allowed for honest conversations about differences in capability and access without prescriptive judgment. The networks became spaces where people could move in and out based on capacity, forming connections that served both the work and human needs.

Takeaways

For those researching care in collaborative settings like me, the work suggested several important considerations:

  1. Embrace partiality and positionality: Following Suchman’s insight that “our vision of the world is a vision from somewhere,” I found that acknowledging my particular position strengthened rather than weakened my research. My specific experiences with these networks provided unique insights precisely because they were situated and from my non-objective experience.
  2. Attend to the mundane: Care often manifests in invisible, everyday practices rather than grand gestures. The mundane work of updating spreadsheets, facilitating conversations, and maintaining morale is where care truly lives.
  3. Value fragility: Rather than seeking robustness and resilience above all, consider how fragility creates spaces for adaptation, divergence, and honest engagement with limitations.
  4. Look beyond individuals: As Annemarie Mol notes, “collectives are not made by adding together its individuals.” Care for networks requires different practices than care for individual members.
  5. Consider artifacts as care agents: The tools, technologies, and objects we create can embody care principles and facilitate care relationships

Working with these networks has transformed my understanding of care from a vague socio-spiritual concept to a concrete practice with political implications. In a world that claims to value efficiency and optimization, these networks might appear “diseased” – inefficient, fragile, too focused on process over product. But as Annemarie Mol suggests:

“The logic of care is definitely better geared to living with a diseased and unpredictable body… examine it, adapt it, fiddle with it, push and pull it, alter it, wherever necessary. The logic of care, as articulated here, is not something to solidify or fix permanently. On the contrary, it is fluid and adaptable.”

If we understand our social and environmental reality as fundamentally broken, then care becomes not just a nice addition but the most appropriate way to navigate our world. These networks demonstrate what it means to combine “active engagement with receptivity” – to care deeply while acknowledging limitations, to persist through setbacks without clinging to rigid expectations.

My hope is that this work contributes to a richer understanding of care as a practice that emerges from and shapes our collaborative efforts. In a time of compounding crises, reimagining how we form and sustain networks may be one of our most important collective tasks.

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