Care + Narrative: Feminist Media Approaches in Pandemic Times 

 Nicole Cote

Introduction

With the COVID-19 pandemic our lives have become even more digital than ever—perhaps more digital than many ever intended. And, with physical distancing, which in various ways may continue for the foreseeable future, we are ever more brought together in digital space. Whether or not we were previously engaged in discussions of media and data practices, they are now inescapable considerations—making them, now more than ever, especially imperative topics for us in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. 

This guide will suggest readings and projects that might allow readers to consider understandings of and engagements with media in pandemic times—through a feminist lens. Various narratives and notions of care and collectivity in digital media spaces, and through data, will be key areas explored, as will the ways in which marginalized groups as a whole are (mis)represented and/or neglected through COVID-19 platforms, media, and stories. It will also offer a way into critically considering our own notions of “care”: the ways in which the term has both been usefully engaged and also co-opted or overused in this moment. The sources provided will attempt to offer a means for considering the complexities of how care is used and what it can signify, and (re)imagining possible feminist ways forward for our media in pandemic times and those that follow.

I. Understanding Care: Considerations for Understanding More-than-Human Narratives of Value and Reciprocity 

The works in this section provide interpretations of care through approaches that are speculative, theoretical, and/or are not specifically about media. They instead offer various considerations readers might then engage, push against, or take into account in considering media work. 

The section opens with an article by David Graeber, who asks readers to care for caregivers and to question what constitutes their own work. Graeber’s “fragile beings taking care of one another'' can also provide a means for considering the more-than-human (MTH) lives entangled in daily human experiences. The zoonotic foundation of the pandemic, the fact that the virus spread from non-human animals to humans, has made apparent the need to shift stories about human relationships with other humans, species, and the world. Alice Rudge’s piece encourages readers to consider narratives of the “wild,” and the othering the pandemic has brought forth. And, David Abrams asks readers to find connection and care in MTH worlds and to consider potential repercussions of remote technologies mediating lives over in-person sensory experiences. 

In considering perspectives that have been rejected from care, the material items wasted in the pandemic, and their effects, are worth noting. Max Liboiron’s article can offer an “in” for engaging such concerns, alongside a consideration of the dangers of universalism. Shannon Mattern offers the perspective of longevity in terms of maintenance and the various (political) facets of care. And, Hobart and Kneese raise useful perspectives on care’s “co-option” and “radical care.” These readings can complicate the ways care is understood and inspire ways forward for considering care and narrative in media work. They also ask readers to consider complexities of “care” and how such representations might fall into the trap of carelessness一for example through neglecting the voices, needs, and labor of various (MTH) communities including those who provide care, in potential uneven value systems and power dynamics enforced in doing this work, in ignoring potential long-term impacts of waste generated in care work as well as responsibilities to others, and in employing the term as a fixed universal一allowing for conversations on how this might extend to media work. 

The below citations include a few representative quotes, keywords, and in some cases ways to engage further. These topics will then be complemented by the subsequent “Applying Care” section. 

David Graeber, “After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep,” Jacobin, 4 Mar 2021. 

Key Quotes:

“Because, in reality, the crisis we just experienced was waking from a dream, a confrontation with the actual reality of human life, which is that we are a collection of fragile beings taking care of one another, and that those who do the lion’s share of this care work that keeps us alive are overtaxed, underpaid, and daily humiliated, and that a very large proportion of the population don’t do anything at all but spin fantasies, extract rents, and generally get in the way of those who are making, fixing, moving, and transporting things, or tending to the needs of other living beings. It is imperative that we not slip back into a reality where all this makes some sort of inexplicable sense, the way senseless things so often do in dreams.” 

“Most of the work we’re currently doing is dream-work. It exists only for its own sake, or to make rich people feel good about themselves, or to make poor people feel bad about themselves. And if we simply stopped, it might be possible to make ourselves a much more reasonable set of promises: for instance, to create an “economy” that lets us actually take care of the people who are taking care of us.” 

Keywords: care work, economy, future thinking, labor

Alice Rudge, “Thinking Beyond the “Wild” Pandemic,” Edge Effects, 25 Mar 2021. 

Key Quotes:

“Often, the ways moralities of “nature” are mobilized in relation to the pandemic overlap with crises of racism and xenophobia, settler colonialism, and ecological degradation. Indeed, the forms that narratives of disease outbreaks take—centering on punishment and retribution for perceived crimes against nature—can themselves help to fuel stigmatization.”

“Zoonotic diseases show us that human and non-human animal health are intimately connected. When we think through how and why, however, we must account for the intellectual trajectories of the terms we use, and the power structures that they may reaffirm…. Let’s re-center discussion of the problems of unequal power and capital that create and suffuse multispecies viral clouds, rather than moralizing on what is clean or disgusting, natural or unnatural, or right or wrong to eat. Perhaps, instead, the “wild” could become a way to transgress dominant Euro-American moralities...and to instead think beyond normative binary ways of conceptualizing the “traditional” and “modern.” 

Keywords: nature, wild, pandemic, media coverage, othering, multispecies

Go Further:

• Short explanatory video: George Monbiot, “In 2008, we bailed out the banks. In 2021, we need to bail out the planet,” openDemocracy, 8 Apr 2021.  

David Abram, “In the Ground of Our Unknowing,” Emergence Magazine, 7 Apr 2020.  

Key Quotes: 

“We’re finally being forced to recognize that no top-down institution, governmental or otherwise, can fully ensure our safety. That our deepest insurance against disaster is going local—by getting to know our actual neighbors and checking in on one another when we can, participating in our local community and apprenticing with the more-than-human terrain that surrounds and sustains us.”

“...while I trust that there’s a lot we’ll be learning from the strangeness of these days in enforced isolation from each other, I sure hope that we’ll not be drawing upon this time to swivel huge swaths of our public and private life permanently into the virtual sphere, away from the necessarily fraught and vulnerable world of fleshly encounter in the thick of the sensuous—which, I hasten to add, is the only world that we share with the other animals, the plants, and the blustering winds.”

Keywords: local, in person, online, more-than-human, virtual space, flesh

Max Liboiron, ‘There’s No Such Thing As “We”,’ Discard Studies, 12 Oct 2020. 

Key Quotes:

“There is no universal “we” when it comes to waste and discarding, and to evoke it erases key actors. One of the critical frameworks of discard studies as a field is to look at how power can be understood as the forces that maintain the inside and outside of systems, that make some things seem truthy and real and the expense of other truths and realities.”

“We aren’t all in this together. Referring to this kind of optimistic universalism, Anaya Roy writes about “Calling bullshit on the popular Covid-19 line, ‘We’re all in this together.’ Used to bestow naive comfort or solicit sacrifice, this slogan obfuscates the structural inequalities of racial capitalism that are being exposed & deepened by this crisis.”” 

Keywords: waste, discard, we, universalism

Go Further:

• For further considerations about material waste in this moment and the relationship between those human and more-than-human lives impacted, see also: Max Liboiron’s “Round Up: Waste & COVID 19” reading list on the Discard Studies site.
• The “COVID-19 Waste Project” and their ongoing “Colloquium” considering the waste sector and the impact of COVID-19. 

Shannon Mattern, “Maintenance and Care,” Places Journal, Nov 2018. https://doi.org/10.22269/181120

Key Quotes:

“Given the degree of brokenness of the broken world (and the expense of fixing it), we need all maintainers to apply their diverse disciplinary methods and practical skills to the collective project of repair.”

“Across the many scales and dimensions of this problem, we are never far from three enduring truths: (1) Maintainers require care; (2) caregiving requires maintenance; and (3) the distinctions between these practices are shaped by race, gender, class, and other political, economic, and cultural forces.”

Keywords: maintenance, infrastructure, care, care work, technology

Go Further:

• Places’ “Field Notes on Pandemic Teaching” series (starting with this article). 
• Places’ “From the Archive: Readings for a Pandemic” reading list.

Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Tamara Kneese, “Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times,” Social Text, 1 Mar 2020. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-7971067

Key Quotes:

“Our interpretation of radical care comprises underlying tensions. The first...is the symbiotic and at times contradictory relationship between self-care and care for others. The second...reveals the normative assumptions baked into care: it is both essential for social reproduction and yet often invisible or undervalued, which means it is ripe for exploitation and co-optation. Finally... within care is the expression of solidarity versus charity, or the way that care is mobilized as a response to neglect or catastrophe.”

“Rather than romanticizing care or ignoring its demons, radical care is built on praxis. As the traditionally undervalued labor of caring becomes recognized as a key element of individual and community resilience, radical care provides a roadmap for an otherwise.”

Keywords: radical care, radical politics, care, resilience, self-care, community, healing

Go Further: 

• This reading is included in the Duke University Press “Care in Uncertain Times Syllabus” that include representations of care that are much more wide-ranging in topic than was focused on in this resource guide. While the resources on that syllabus are not all entirely open, the articles are and all introductions to included books are open.   

II. Applying Care: Considerations on Ways Forward In / With Media and Why

Building on “Understanding Care,” this section more directly engages ideas on media and representation in ways that relate to this moment. It starts with an essay by Kim Gallon of the COVID Black project who speaks to the signifcance of COVID data analytics from a Black Feminist persepctive, which she says, “reveals an unstable relationship between data, care, and justice.” Una Lee and Dann Toliver’s zine adds to this by calling for consent in technological spaces; and, in response to online harm, Niloufar Salehi speaks to how restorative justice might drive media applications. The Qudsiya Naqui and Aimi Hamraie podcast engages ideas of disability and access in the time of COVID, especially in considering remote work, as well as potentials for collective and collaborative tools with access in mind. The co-authored Stuart J. Murray and Deborah Lynn Steinberg essay reflects questions of self-representation, online spaces of mourning and dying and, in particular, the “intermediary place” of the blog form一allowing readers to question what media can and cannot offer in finding connection, in memory work, and engaging grief in precarious times. Legacy Russell closes-out this guide by offering readers glitch and the critical refusal of systems as they exist. Indeed, from ideas of representation and consent, to considering uses of media and narrative in this moment, variations of care, and the impossibility and refusal of returning to approaches taken by pre-pandemic selves might benefit from embracing what Russell has termed “Glitch Feminism.” 

The above writers offer ways forward in using care in media and narrative practices, those grounded in respect, consent, reciprocity, and a reorientation of the who and what and the how of what generates significance—and how care is applied. Such a reshaping might allow media practices, applied and critical, to move beyond what Graeber calls “dream-work.” As before, the below citations will include keywords, a few representative quotes and, in some cases, ways to engage the ideas further. 

Kim Gallon (COVID Black), ‘“Care” and COVID-19: A Call for Black Feminist Data Analytics, Part II,’ Medium, 19 Oct 2020. 

Key Quotes:

“...Black women continue to perform a disproportionate amount of care in the labor force. We see this most visibly in the direct care industry in healthcare settings…..”

“Black feminist thought shifts meanings about care from being located in white spaces where it is largely resigned to being defined as labor to ones in which Black communities both determine and are the recipients of Black women’s care. However, Black communities also validate it and sanction its affective and intellectual power.”

“Black women’s experiences in the coronavirus pandemic reveal how care should be instrumental in the way we manage and analyze data. Black Feminist data analytics offers a method for applying processes of care that decenter the data scientist and privilege community knowledge through call-and-response. Just as importantly, analyzing data from Black feminist theory and praxis highlights an ethic of risk, which reveals an unstable relationship between data, care, and justice.”

Keywords: data, black feminist ethics, care, analysis

Go Further:

• Important mention: Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, Data Feminism, The MIT Press, 2020. 
• Important mention: Sasha Costanza-Chock, Design Justice: Community Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need, The MIT Press, 2020. Read the other articles by Kim Gallon in COVID Black’s “...A Call for Black Feminist Data Analytics” series: Part 1 and Part 3 on Medium. 
• Kim Gallon’s presentation at the UCLA Information Studies Colloquia: “Kim Gallon-Homegoing: The Technology of Living Data and Black Public Mourning in the Age of COVID-19” on YouTube. 
• Philipp Dominik Keidl et al. (eds). Pandemic Media. Meson Press, 2020. 

Una Lee and Dann Toliver, “Building Consentful Tech Zine,” The Consentful Tech Project. Download a PDF of the zine here. 

Key Quotes:

“When it comes to our physical bodies, we know there is more to consent than a simple yes or no. Medical procedures like surgery require the informed consent of the patient…. But what about consent beyond our physical bodies? These days, we also have digital bodies...made up of pieces of personal data. Like our physical bodies, our digital bodies exist in relationship with others and can participate in communities. They can also experience harm.”

“Consentful technologies are applications and spaces in which consent underlies all aspects, from the way they are developed, to how data is stored and accessed, to the way interactions happen between users. We use consentful instead of “consensual” because the latter implies a singular ask or interaction. Consentful technology is about a holistic and ongoing approach to consent.”

Keywords: consent, consentful, digital bodies, online platforms, apps

Go Further:

• Precarity Lab Collective, Technoprecarious. Goldsmiths Press, 2020. 

Niloufar Salehi, “Do No Harm,” Logic Magazine, 31 Aug 2020. 

Key Quotes:

“Although restorative justice has to be adapted to different communities and circumstances, its principles have been successfully codified into processes and formal training and embedded in churches, workplaces, and neighborhoods…. What would an approach to online harm grounded in restorative justice look like?”

“Content moderation [sic] What content has been reported? Is the content against the rules? Should the content be removed, demoted, flagged, or ignored? Restorative justice [sic] Who has been hurt? What are their needs? Whose obligation is it to meet those needs?”

Keywords: restorative justice, harm, online content, accountability

Qudsiya Naqui (host) and Aimi Hamraie (guest), “Critical Design in the Age of COVID,” Down to the Struts (podcast), 2 Mar 2021. 

Key Quotes:

“And so there was a hashtag. In the early part of the pandemic, it was hashtag accessibility for abled...putting out all the ways that when non disabled people suddenly decided that...life itself depended on participating remotely and doing work remotely and...it felt like within a matter of weeks, everyone had figured it out technologically. And so those feasibility arguments were not as good anymore. But you know, in many cases, people were sort of like reinventing the wheel or figuring things out for the first time, that disabled people that already figured it out.” 

“...Lewis Mumford says...that technology can both like, liberate us, and it can kind of like, trap us, constrain us. And that's because it's a thing...people have designed and it's not always designed that keeps everybody in mind…. What it means is that we all have to be actively involved and constantly designing new ways of doing things and doing them creatively.”

Keywords: Zoom, remote, accessibility, abled, design

Go Further:

• Khairani Baorkka. “May This Pandemic Help Us Abandon Ableist Language.” Catapult,
• Alex Haagaard. “Notes on Temporal Inaccessibility.” Medium. 
• Jillian Weise. “Common Cyborg.” Granta. 

Stuart J Murray and Deborah Lynn Steinberg, “To Mourn, To Re-imagine Without Oneself: Death, Dying, and Social Media/tion,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 7 May 2018. 

Key Quotes:

“The intermediating place of the blog forms part of the transforming ecologies of mourning and the place(s) of dying…. I take these to be media ecologies, and the ways they constitute and sometimes contest the “proper” or “expected” destitute place(s) of dying in our culture, from deathbeds to hospitals...but also “place” in a deep ecological sense, as metaphor for those interconnected lives and losses that define and gather us, and that constitute the larger scene on which words are spoken, circulated, and inhabited as worlds across indefinite conversations. Wor(l)ds that permit us to imagine a passage, a movement, and that do not simply contain or constrain.”

“A digital body politic, if you will. It is not that self-sovereignty is irrelevant there, in this intermediary place; rather, it is, perhaps, that place without which any claim to bodily sovereignty, to a “me” and a “you,” no longer makes sense, no longer has purchase. It suggests a very different ecology, a future that calls us despite the diminishing places of care in a culture that repudiates death even as it is hell-bent on delivering it, often to those whose self-sovereignty was never more than a cruel deceit, a false form of popular “empowerment.” 

Keywords: death, mourning, dying, blogs, media, co-authorship, memory, intermediary

Go Further:

• Lois Parshley. “Cleave: How Will We Remember Covid-19?” Pioneer Works. 
• Sharrona Pearl. “Symptom Check: Narrating one’s own illness can counterbalance how the pandemic has been politicized” Real Life Magazine. 2 Jul 2020.
• The University of Arizona Poetry Center. “Dear Vaccine.” 
• Vianey et al. “Pandemic Diaries: High School Edition.” Grow by Ginko, 10 Mar 2021. 

Legacy Russell, “Digital Dualism And The Glitch Feminism Manifesto,” The Society Pages, 10 Dec 2012. 

Key Quotes:

“Glitch Feminism...embraces the causality of “error,” and turns the gloomy implication of glitch on its ear by acknowledging that an error in a social system that has already been disturbed by economic, racial, social, sexual, and cultural stratification and the imperialist wrecking-ball of globalization—processes that continue to enact violence on all bodies—may not, in fact, be an error at all, but rather a much-needed erratum. This glitch is a correction to the “machine,” and, in turn, a positive departure.”

“It is a long road ahead, we are in beta, yet the necessary “malfunction” is well under way. As for the outcome? Well, fortunately, it’s still buffering.”

Keywords: glitch, technology, feminism

Go Further:

• Russell’s website includes a number of freely available presentations of her work on glitch: Legacy Russell, “#GLITCHFEMINISM,” Legacy Russell.  
• See more on acts of refusal in technical practices: Cifor, M., Garcia, P., Cowan, T.L., Rault, J., Sutherland, T., Chan, A., Rode, J., Hoffmann, A.L., Salehi, N., Nakamura, L. (2019). “Feminist Data Manifest-No.”

Conclusion

The sources provided in this guide have sought to offer a way into the complexities of how ideas of care are used, what such narratives can signify, make apparent, or neglect, and how these ideas might (or might not) be usefully employed in (re)imagining possible feminist ways forward for media work. It does not presume to be a comprehensive guide to the study of care in general or in terms of media, but rather a launching off point一to connect readers with various open and freely available works in this space. To conclude, the below section offers a few overarching questions that might inspire classroom discussion or possible ways forward for research in this space.  

Focus Questions

• How might media work embrace care in new or maintained ways during and following the pandemic, and away from what David Graeber terms “dream-work”?
• How might more-than-human perspectives relate to David Graeber’s idea of “economy” and/or more broadly to narrative approaches in pandemic and following times?
• How are co-options of care and maintenance present in presentations of the pandemic available in the media? What are examples of media that (would) push against such notions?
• What would a care-focused use of media on the pandemic look like?
• How might the discussions of accessibility and/or “Glitch Feminism” be put in conversation with David Abrams’ notions of lives online?
• Who gets to tell stories, create memories, and speak for themselves both in this moment and beyond? 
• How can/should death and dying be represented? How might stories of loss be told? And, how might we speak for others and co-author those moments when needed/desired?

Nicole Cote is a second year PhD student at the Graduate Center. She holds an MS in Integrated Digital Media from NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering and an MScR from the University of Edinburgh. She works at the intersection of the environmental and digital humanities, thinking about plants, knowledge generation, and applying feminist theory and ethics to those fields.