Lire cette lettre en français:
“There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.”
This quote by Octavia Butler has infused my work since the start of this project, a little over five months ago. It captures a dual reality behind the creation of The Fifth Wave Institute.
First, the current organisation of care in our societies is a broken one. It’s disproportionately shouldered by certain groups of people. It fails to provide the adequate care all of us need to thrive. It denies that vulnerability and interdependence are essential dimensions of our shared human condition, treating them as odd glitches. It prioritises clinical and short-term economic outcomes over a holistic understanding of well-being. It siloes care into separated segments of our lives, rather than grounding it at the heart of community, work, and family life. It is ill-equipped to deal with the consequences of substantial ongoing demographic changes.
Second, this isn’t a fatality. There are new suns. Better systems exist and are being built across the world. Others are being imagined by researchers, activists, organisers, and can be made a reality. Better ideas about care exist, new ones are continuously emerging, and they can be made to reach many more minds than they currently are.
This dual reality is our ‘why’. The Institute exists because the way we structure and understand care is inadequate, and we need to envision bold and interconnected solutions to fix it.
As the first month of this new year comes to a close, and in the spirit of building in public, I wanted to make our ‘how’ a bit more explicit. To clearly lay out the different areas of our work, and give you an idea of what’s to come. As I set out to do so, I was reminded – by the lovely Rachel Piper – of another quote, this time by a thoughtful scholar of Butler, adrienne maree brown:
“We need to move from competitive ideation, trying to push our individual ideas, to collective ideation, collaborative ideation. It isn’t about having the number one best idea, but having ideas that come from, and work for, more people.”1
The association felt fitting. Black feminists have already said much of what we need to change the world. So that’s our ‘how’: we’re a think-and-act tank, grounded in the insights of care ethics and feminist care studies2, working to a) apply those insights to transform our understanding of care and b) scale them into replicable policy solutions. In other words, we aim to take the products of collective ideation, and use them to build care systems that work for more people.
This work is organised as follows:
THINK
Publications
Blueprints
We analyse local and national alternatives to current care systems, in order to learn from, adapt, and replicate them. Blueprints are incredibly useful for three reasons.
One, the necessity of care and the essence of what constitutes good care transcend borders: care systems need to be tailored to their specific cultural, social, political and economic context, but the broad principles that make them successful and the lessons extracted from their challenges can inform systems-building across the world.
Two, when it comes to social innovation, the “local initiative —> replication —> integration into the national infrastructure” pipeline is a tried and tested way to drive society-wide change. We believe in starting small, and scaling what works.
Three, ‘care systems’ is a huge umbrella: it includes spaces like schools, hospitals, birthing homes, domestic violence shelters, families, nursing homes, foster centers, community health centers or even public housing, as well as the institutions, laws, and economic forces that determine how those are organised. We don’t claim we’ll know how to transform them all — and much specialised knowledge already exists. Rather, our value lies in taking a connected look at how care flows within and across these systems, in order to inform better, integrated solutions.
Blueprints we’ve published include:
Upcoming ones include:
An analysis of New Zealand's early childhood curriculum, Te Whāriki, a compelling example of a pedagogical model rooted in care ethics
Our first field research project, focused on France’s network of public ‘Maternal and Child Protection’ centres.3
Interviews
We publish interviews with people building the futures of care, whether through their practice or their thinking. People who try their hardest to make up for the harshness of our systems with creativity and passion.
And because the best insights on care come from caring, I ask all my interviewees: “Who do you care for, and who cares for you?”
Interviews we’ve published include:
Upcoming ones include:
A conversation with Claire Favre, a clinical psychologist working in French prisons, about what it means to care in environments defined by violence.
A conversation with Sarah Kaddoura, a Palestinian feminist organiser and writer, about migrant domestic labour, global chains of care, and what feminist solidarity across the Global South can teach us about interdependence.
Essays
We publish writing which helps us understand what our relationship to care is lacking, why it matters, and envisions another way forward. We aim to elevate the importance of caregiving in all its forms, as essential public infrastructure, as a structuring principle of social life, and as a central concern of political decision-making.
Essays we’ve published include:
Upcoming ones include:
An exploration of what our uneasiness about technology in care reveals of the state of our systems
A French writer’s plea to rethink left-wing politics around vulnerability and care.
Events
Exciting things coming. Watch this space.
ACT
We aim to advise organisations, local councils, health and education departments, and similar institutions to help them design, build, replicate and scale alternatives to current care systems.
In the short term, this work focuses on France, as that is where the Institute is registered. Our first big policy initiative is in the works, happening in the context of France’s municipal elections in March. Stay tuned for updates on that.
This dual goal of thinking and acting will mean we’ll often have to help build things under this sun while we imagine life under new ones. I don’t see that as a contradiction. The spectrum of social change ranges from a radical reinvention of our existing structures — radical in its primary sense of ‘at the root’, not necessarily most extreme — to incremental progress within existing constraints.
We want to do both, even if that means often having to make do with the trappings of bureaucracy, politics, and human stubbornness. Even if that means helping to build imperfect systems; as long as they’re systems that work for more people.
Starting now, this monthly digest of latest publications, upcoming events and other updates on our work will be the main edition of the Institute’s newsletter. Occasional articles may sometimes go out to your inbox, but most will be posted in their respective categories on our website. You’re welcome to toggle on individual sub-newsletters in your subscription settings if you wish to receive these directly.
If you want to read us in French, a reminder that you can unsubscribe from the main English newsletter and subscribe directly to receive our emails in French by clicking on your account icon in the top right hand corner of your screen, and then on ‘Manage subscription’.
This is going to be an exciting year. Again, we welcome collective ideation. Don’t hesitate to share your thoughts with us, topics you’d like to see more research on, or blueprints we could analyse. Moreover, if you know caregivers, midwives, researchers, journalists, organisers, local officials, anyone who cares about care, anyone building the care society who you think would benefit from engaging with our work, don’t hesitate to share it with them too.
Thank you,
With care,
— MM
adrienne maree brown, 2017. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. AK Press. https://www.akpress.org/emergentstrategy.html
And childhood studies, disability or ‘crip’ studies, and more.
In the spirit of collective ideation, the Van Leer Foundation’s Early Childhood Matters journal has many great blueprints; another inspiring one is the Treehouse Foundation’s ‘foster village’ model which I discovered through Lisa Sibbett’s newsletter.
P.S: Apologies for the slightly subpar logos. If you want to help us design better graphics, don’t hesitate to become a paid subscriber!
This is THE work Melina, work that benefits everybody and everything. There is nothing more important than care - life giving, life saving, life enriching and life affirming.
Care is not a temporary and cost negotiated ‘quick fix’ to societies ills and pathologies but the underpinning of a healthy, happy and sustainable world.
Looking forward to reading more and contributing more to The Fifth Wave Institute.
I will be watching this space. I was a care taker for a while and see the need for reform, for more compassion and kindness so directly. More honesty about what is really needed, the human aspect of it all.