Gender and Women’s Studies Colloquium

Akemi Nishida
Assistant Professor
Disability and Human Development, University of Illinois-Chicago

“Rethinking Interdependence: Desiring Messy Dependency”

For this talk, I will explore and reconceptualize the idea of interdependence by paying attention to how this idea came to be actualized in disability communities. This talk draws from my conversations with those who engage in care collectives. Care collective is a community-based alternative care support structure disabled people organized  with their friends and allies in order to meet their care needs and to intentionally practice interdependence. I look into how interdependence is actualized through care collectives to illuminate both challenges and desires those I talked to experienced. It can be moments when the practice of interdependence becomes twisted up with the pervasive capitalist understanding of reciprocal and mutual caring. Or also observed is the pressure to make the interdependent care collective harmonious. Many I talked to felt the pressure to be respectable to one another was turned into ways to dictate who were considered as worthy of community care supports and who were not. Under those challenges, what they desired was to transgress the boundary and to become entangled in what I call a messy dependency with one another. Messy dependency rejects any pressure to be productive, while the productivity is embraced in the practice of interdependence in order to reciprocate care among one another. With the idea of messy dependency, I explore how dependency can be a desirable asset disability communities bring to the world.

Wheelchair accessible, free, and open to the public. THIS IS A FRAGRANCE-FREE EVENT.  For ASL interpretation or other accessibility requests, please contact dazeps@wisc.edu by February 14th.