“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”
— Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 1984, p. 110-114.
mapping care is part of my dissertation project at the Critical Disability Studies program at York University, which involves a series of arts-making collaborations that contemplate the question, how do we practice care without replicating violence, in response to people who have experienced violence?
It understands violence as not limited to physical, verbal, or other kinds of explicit assaults, but also as colonial violence, racist oppression, cisheteropatriarchal subjugation, ableist exclusions, sanist discriminations, capitalist exploitations, structural/institutional barriers, and other conditions that systematically limit or preclude the access of resources to a livable life for certain groups of people but not others.
The project works with stories from collaborators, including myself, who have living experiences in subjugated and/or subjugating positions within spaces that are supposed to be caring, such as social services, mental health services, and education institutions, and would like to share ideas and hopes about crafting different tools to build a different kind of world.
Thank you for visiting this space,
Patricia Ki