Feedback Session: ‘Counter Care’ facilitated by Loren Beard and Sheila

Counter Care attends to the subversive, relational practices that sustain life under conditions designed to exhaust it. We work in response to systems and structures that unevenly distribute care, merging it with coercion, commodifying it, and sustaining it through devalued labor. Rooted in an intersectional feminist ethic, we take seriously the knowledge produced at these margins: the strategies, improvisations, and refusals that make life possible where institutions withdraw.

Our core project is a living, open-access archive of strategies for survival, kinship, and transformation. The entries trace how marginalized communities craft networks of endurance, mutual aid, and care outside and against systems that work against them. We orient towards care as method and material: a means of unmaking domination and materializing possibility. To practice counter care is to refuse extraction, center interdependence, and compose against collapse.

This project is an invitation to engage, contribute, and co-create a shared record of sustenance and resistance. What we build here is partial and ongoing, ever-shifting as the conditions it responds to shift. We return to it, revise it, and expand it as a site of praxis -- remaking what is possible to know and what is possible to do.

This session spans three phases. We ask participants to arrive with curiosity about their care practices, and the improvisations, refusals, and solidarities that sustain them.

Project overview: Naming the archive (30min) Loren and Sheila will introduce Counter Care as a concept and a living project. We will explore what it attends to, how it was made, and why it takes the form of an open-access archive. We’ll also trace the sociopolitical conditions which shape the project and share grounding materials as entry points into its lineage and vision.

Reflective exercise: What Is Counter Care? (30min) Guided by the question "How do you practice counter care?", participants will be invited into a structured writing reflection, followed by small-group exchange. In these groups, we'll surface the range of knowledge and practices that participants carry with them.

Group share out and feedforward (30min) We will reconvene as a group to trace what emerged and close with feedforward. We’ll reflect on: What does this conversation make possible? What do we want to take into the archive, into our own work, into the commons we're building? Participants are welcome to contribute strategies, provocations, or questions to further shape the project.

Resources: Pharma waters, pharma selves [2024] by Loren Beard

https://schoolofcommons.org/program/labs/pharma-waters-pharma-selves

Supplanting biophobic loneliness [2024] by Loren Beard and Sheila Shankar https://www.logancenter.uchicago.edu/pitchit/loneliness

Closer to home // dream as dissent: a dialogue on Asian American feminist refusal, healing, and possibility [2025] by Sheila Shankar and Soo Young Lee https://irw.rutgers.edu/rejoinder-webjournal/issue-10-dissenting-feminisms/754-sheila-shankar-and-soo-young-lee-closer-to-home-dream-as-dissent-a-dialogue-on-asian-american-feminist-refusal-healing-and-possibility