“What does it mean,” disability justice activist and writer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha asks, “to shift our ideas of access and care (whether it’s disability, childcare, economic access, or many more) from an individual chore…to a collective responsibility that’s maybe even deeply joyful?” (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2019). Considering the networks that Black and Brown queer people create to support each other, Piepzna-Samarasinha provides a framework and an invitation for weaving what she terms care webs, which are lines of support, access, and care for sick and disabled people that are made up of disabled and nondisabled people, and extend beyond the state and the biological family household.
Piepzna-Samarasinha’s concept of care webs opens up exciting possibilities for reimaging classroom pedagogy. In the context of education, care webs might initially seem like a form of collective caregiving far different from the practice of working together on course assignments. Afterall, group work in...
University of California Press