What we wrote about it at the time: These workshops have been conceived as a series of three, over which time a small group can spend in-depth time together, learning and exploring the subjects at hand, building on each workshop together. As such, people who can attend all three will be given priority when booking.

Could a capacity to care-for imply a reappraisal of suffering as a catalytic and intensifying category of the political? Does the ‘care industry’ summon forth its own class, an ‘affective class’, that militates against the carelessness of self-interest.

Over a series of three workshops (also taking place on Wednesday and Saturday) Howard will open up a space of reflection and co-learning, in which we can bring our experiences to bear on the theme of care, work and class. Care is closely linked to our ineffable emotional capacities, but it is too often deemed passive, benevolent and exploitable by those who want to harbour it as a commodity. Looking at how we consciously attend to each other’s joys and pains, we hope that Work Care Class can explore how we could come to re-site care, causing it to surface in the struggle against human commodification.

The workshops are open to people that self-identify as carers or care-workers, and workers or non-workers who care. Snacks will be provided.

Howard is a volunteer play therapist, autodidact, poet, archivist and scholar of the radical expression of social movements, an educator and writer on the politics of music, improvisation, care and labour.

WORK CARE CLASS

We hear a lot about care Care comes in many guises

Caring professions Kindness

Couldn’t care less Paid pretence

Care Package Compassion

Care as a response to

Economic precariousness

Variegated vulnerability

Emotional needs

To allow for the space to be open for frank discussion amongst the participants, the workshop was not documented.