A case for care: questions and answers from a movement in motion

Social movements across history and geography have fought for systemic liberation from all forms of oppression, realizing that society cannot be transformed under the pervading eco-nomic, political, and social forces which control the lives of the poor and dispossessed. How-ever, these same forces of oppression inflict harm and trauma onto people which gets ex-pressed in the body and manifests in disorganizing dynamics within movements. This research examines how organizations within one revolutionary movement network in the United States, the University of the Poor, have developed their own theory and praxis around care, whose purpose is to process and transmute the tensions that inevitably arise in move-ment work due to the oppressive context within which the movement is embedded. This research combines Marxist political economy with contemporary literature on embodiment and trauma, ethnographic participatory observation, and qualitative, semi-structured inter-views with movement leaders to examine practices of care and how these practices contribute to the movement’s goals. Through these approaches, this study discovers that care is a key component of movement building, as it works to preserve, develop, and transform leaders, attune the body to new dispositions for interacting with each other, build movement struc-tures which embody revolutionary values as opposed to that of the hegemonic system, and create the conditions of what the movement is fighting for in the here and now.