On Caring |The Project invites a conversation on what we care about, who we care about, how we care, and what we know about caring. We think of caring as a watershed channeling needs and desires along streams of nine interdependent modes of caring. We produce On Caring podcasts, vodcasts, and a blog. We talk to scholars, practitioners, ethicists, artists and filmmakers, poets and writers, farmers, workers, and politicians about caring practices and how to imagine a truly caring society. We ask questions about the social order. Where have we come from? What is it like now? Where are we going? What is to be done?

The Project was inspired by our observations of the failures in caring exposed by Covid-19: in nursing homes, in prisons, in communities of color, and among frontline workers. All experienced unequal exposure to the virus and high rates of morbidity and mortality. We learned that existing safety nets were insufficient to catch workers as they faced loss of income and work. How did this happen? What can we learn? What alternatives to our current welfare and benevolent states (as protectors and guarantors of our safety) might be imagined? How might communities imagine altogether different practices of caring; caring without walls, borders, police and military, and intrusive forms of surveillance? These questions, and many more, require thoughtful engagements across the disciplines and our society in order to imagine different modes of caring practices, research, and policy. 
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Welcome to On Caring |The Project.

Modes of Caring

Mode  noun (1)

a. a manner of doing; method; way; a particular type or form of something; a designated condition or status, as for performing a task or responding to a problem;

b. n philosophy, appearance, form, or disposition taken by a thing, or by one of its essential properties or attributes.

Oxford English Dictionary