Pirate Care

Author: Katherine Pingeton

Short Summary

In their own words, “Pirate Care is a transnational research project and a network of activists, scholars and practitioners who stand against the criminalization of solidarity and for a common care infrastructure.” Pirate Care seeks to meet “the need to offer humanitarian or lifesaving care even if the state chooses to criminalize it” (source). An example of Pirate Care is the actions of Women on Waves, who deliver abortion pills from boats harbored in international waters to women in countries where abortion is criminalized.

Website address: https://pirate.care/pages/concept/

Location: Primarily based in the transnational European space

Leaders: Convened by Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars, and Tomislav Medak

Profile

“We live in a world where captains get arrested for saving people’s lives on the sea; where a person downloading scientific articles faces 35 years in jail; where people risk charges for bringing contraceptives to those who otherwise couldn’t get them. Folks are getting in trouble for giving food to the poor, medicine to the sick, water to the thirsty, shelter to the homeless. And yet our heroines care and disobey. They are pirates.” (source)

Pirate Care maps the forms of activism at the intersection of “care” and “piracy.” It “considers the assumption that we live in a time in which care–understood as a political and collective capacity of society–is becoming increasingly defunded, discouraged and criminalized” (source). Pirate Care suggests that neoliberal policies have re-organized the basic provisions of democratic life, including healthcare, housing, access to knowledge, right to asylum, freedom of mobility, and social benefits. Because of this, these provisions have been used as tools for surveilling, excluding, and punishing the most vulnerable. Their syllabus explains these political and power dynamics of care:

  1. Caring is not intrinsically “nice”; it always involves power relations. Processes of discipline, exclusion and harm can operate inside the matrix of care.
  2. Care labour holds the capacity to disobey power and increase our collective freedom. This is why when it is organized in capitalist, patriarchal and racist ways, it does not work for most living beings. We are in a global crisis of care.
  3. There are no wrong people. Yet, caring for the “wrong” people is more and more socially discouraged, made difficult and criminalized. For many, the crisis of care has been there for a very long time.
  4. Caring is necessary and skilled labour.
  5. Care labour is shared unfairly and violently in most societies, along lines of gender, provenance, race, class, ability, and age. Some are forced to care, while some defend their privilege of expecting service. This has to change.
  6. Caring labour needs full access to resources, knowledge, tools and technologies. When these are taken away, we must claim them back.
According to David Bollier, “the Pirate Care syllabus aims to elevate care as something that arises, and is maintained, through commoning.” In this respect, he writes, “care is about resisting state power and markets.” For example, the German NGO Sea-Watch conducts civil search and rescue operations in the Central Mediterranean despite the criminalization of these rescues by the state.

Those who practice Pirate Care experiment with “self-organization, alternative approaches to social reproduction, and the commoning of tools, technologies and knowledges” (source). This includes acts of civil disobedience as well as the risk of persecution for providing “illegal care,” as illustrated in the Sea-Watch example.

YOUTUBE YwL_QB0E0B0 A conversation about Pirate Care between Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars, and Tomislav Medak as part of the exhibition "...of bread, wine, cars, security, and peace" at Kunsthalle Wien.

Governance

Pirate Care was assembled by Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars, and Tomislav Medak. It is governed by a network of activists, researchers, and practitioners. They developed an online publishing framework that fuels collaborative writing, remixing, and maintaining the syllabus.

Projects

  • Syllabus: In 2019, the Pirate Care course syllabus was created with the goal of bringing together and outlining different knowledges, techniques, and tools for supporting, inspiring, and activating collective processes of learning from Pirate Care. The syllabus documents a range of Pirate Care practices. It is a tool/outline for supporting and activating collective processes of learning from practices of Pirate Care.
  • Exhibitions: These build on the Pirate Care syllabus, artistically presenting a selection of topics and examples from the syllabus.

Friends & Partners

  • The work done on Pirate Care’s syllabus is an extension of the Memory of the World shadow library. Pirate Care notes that shadow libraries themselves are a Pirate Care practice because “they are assisting readers across a highly unequal world of education and research” (source) despite the prevalence of copyright regulation.

Finances

[Note: Couldn't find any info about their funding]

Origin Story

Pirate Care’s syllabus was inspired by the recent phenomenon of crowdsourced online syllabi generated within social justice movements. They were particularly inspired by the hashtag syllabi that is connected with social justice movements, many of which are U.S.-based and arise from anti-racist struggles led by Black American and feminist activists. One example of the crowdsourced online syllabi are #BlkWomenSyllabus and #SayHerNameSyllabus, which trended on Twitter in August 2015.

Pirate Care held their first writing retreat in November 2019. They were hosted by the cultural center Drugo More and were supported via the Rijeka European Capital of Culture 2020 programme. They covered a range of topics, including feminist approaches to reproductive healthcare; autonomous mental health support; trans health and well-being; free access to knowledge; housing struggles; collective childcare; the right to free mobility; migrant solidarity; community safety and anti-racist organising. Within the following months, two more topics were developed for their syllabus: migrant rescue in the Mediterranean and a model for autonomously organizing peer-to-peer care at scale.

See Also

Sources