How has care been centered in your teaching and work? Reflections from our Advisory Collective

CARE SYLLABUS’ programming is shaped by the expertise of our advisory collective, made up of members from five different educational and cultural organizations in the Northern Berkshires: MCLA, MASS MoCA, The Clark Art Institute, Williams College, and Williams College Museum of Art.

At our Spring 2021 meeting, we asked our members to reflect on how care has been central to their work over the last few months. Their responses reflect the caring intention and breadth of critical energy that make CARE SYLLABUS a holding space for collaboration and connection.

The following conversation has been edited for clarity.

Dear advisory collective, how have you been thinking about care in your teaching and work? 

Melanie Mowinski: The past three months have been really telling for me, because I had a major surgery in December 2020 — I had a hip replacement, and so I've had to really think about care in a very different way. Going through that in the middle of a pandemic made me think about a lot of different people who have had to be hospitalized. My stepdaughter was diagnosed with MS in October and she was in the hospital for a week all by herself. Nobody could visit her because of Covid restrictions. I ended up being hospitalized for a couple of days when I had my surgery because of a weird response to the anesthesia so I couldn't have any visitors. A part of taking care of yourself, is having support of other people.

This is something that I really thought about a lot in the past four or five months: how so many people have had to weather things by themselves. How do you weather something by yourself? What are the things that you can do to take care of yourself in order to build yourself up — whether it's reaching out to someone by telephone or zoom, or the more solitary things that you do? In terms of taking care of myself after my surgery, my primary physical therapy was to walk as much as I could tolerate. 

I have a walking practice that is part of a body of work entitled, Walking As A Creative Practice. (There are also different artists who use walking in their work that I follow.) So walking is a way of taking care of myself. I've made a series of labyrinths in the snow that are based on the Chartres Cathedral labyrinth. One of my ways of taking care of myself is walking the labyrinth a number of times a day. The caretaking is not just the actual act of walking, the act of time in and time out, but of also entering the labyrinth with intention. The intention could be of healing myself, or the intention could be an offering to someone else, like my father, who passed away three years ago. I really felt like my father was with me during my surgery, so walking into that labyrinth, I often offered the walk to him with gratitude. 

In my own work, as I'm preparing for a sabbatical, I'm very curious about how walking relates to this concept of wilderness mindset. When you go for a walk, you really don't know what you're going to encounter. You could encounter a bear easily. You could see a coyote. (Vicky and I saw a coyote last week when we were walking!) We think about those sightings in the wilderness, but that's also true in the world. My husband is a native New Yorker, and he was like, ‘You know, in the 70s. In the 80s, you didn't know what was going to happen to you when you walked out on the streets of New York City, you could have gotten mugged anywhere.’ 

There’s this piece where we really don't know what's going to happen. And this year has definitely driven that home for all of us. Things can really change on a dime. You can create that experience for yourself when you're walking in the woods, or on the street, especially if you're paying attention. If you open yourself up to the intentionality of anything could happen, you might experience a walk in a different way and that circles back to the idea of care in the sense of if we care about where we are, if we care about what we're doing, if we care about how we approach things, being open to that, anything can happen. 

Melanie Mowinski is a Professor of Fine and Performing Arts at MCLA.

Christina Yang: At WCMA, we've committed to creating content for the early fall module of CARE SYLLABUS, so we’re busy creating ideas for that programming. Stepping back a bit, we think about care every day. Working as curators, there is a very close connection between the ways in which we think about the stewardship of our objects, our work with artists, and our communities as a whole. Curating with care, curating carefully, is a set of themes we hope to explore more with CARE SYLLABUS, especially in relation to Lisa Dorin’s permanent collection exhibition, “Sweaty Concepts.” Drawn from WCMA’s collection of contemporary art, this show really looks at the ways in which certain bodies do not have a home in the world — how, in fact, you might really have to labor to create a place for yourself. The title is drawn from a Sara Ahmed text, and we’re really excited, in our role as a campus museum, to think with care for a general audience, student care, and the place of an exhibition like this as part of ongoing curriculum development and community engagement during still always challenging times.

Christina Yang is Deputy Director for Engagement and Curator of Education at Williams College Museum of Art.

Gage McWeeney: This year at the Oakley Center, we've been putting on a number of lectures as part of The Pandemic Series, with my colleague Ahmed Ragab, who's a historian of early modern Islam and science. We've had a really compelling group of folks who work broadly in medical humanities, some people in anthropology and a range of other disciplines to think about the pandemic, to step back and talk about questions around inequality and questions around science from a number of critical perspectives. 

We just had a recent session with Jeremy Greene, who's an M.D. at Johns Hopkins, and a really wonderful scholar of pharmaceuticals. He also has a clinic in Baltimore that he runs. When you meet people like this, I find myself trying not to be reduced to tears in hearing about the work that my colleagues are doing out in the world. One of the things that I was really struck by in his talk was hearing about the work that he's trained to do around the best approach to the pandemic. Early on, there was the question of vaccine versus therapeutics and other forms of responses. Obviously, all the energies went into the vaccine and there was thinking available about how you will make those vaccines very successful on a global scale. Those conversations were not successful, but Greene is an example of someone who continues to do incredible work in the face of that failure. 

We're also having a series of internal conversations at Williams involving students, which has been really illuminating and challenging. I'm not teaching this year, in fact, so I’ve felt quite out of touch with the usual forms of care that I try to practice with my students. That has felt like a great loss. But I’ve been spending more time thinking of my colleagues as people in need of different kinds of care. 

Gage McWeeny is Professor of English and Director of the Oakley Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences at Williams College.

Mohamad Junaid: In the last few months, I’ve been thinking deeply about care as a way of engaging with my own being as a Kashmiri, and about how to relate to movements of justice and liberation around the world. And I’m also thinking about care in terms of the way we are being hailed — you know, “be careful,” and how we become this kind of new subjects in this age of surveillance. 

After years of work and gathering people, we have realized the idea of a Center for Kashmir. At the Center, I'm leading or working with a group of fantastic scholars from all over the country from the US and Europe, and will be part of the project called Curating the Present. There's a sense of urgency, because of the situation unfolding in Kashmir, where the Indian government has over the last few years been changing laws and initiating what can be called settler colonial policies, including land grabbing and forcible evictions. And so a lot of scholars and activists and, you know, other people who care are deeply worried about the consequences of this. Also, the work that we are going to do at the Center for Kashmir is really trying to understand how to look at the present, because, you know, I mean, I'm interested in the idea of the history of the present and thinking about how we have reached this place. Were there always indications that these things were going to happen? And so, what is important in the present to remember? When the coming generations of scholars emerge, what would they find about the present that we would need to have preserved for them to understand what is going on right now? This is a kind of multi-year research project backed by a great group of doctors, medical surgeons and well-established people. The center is based in Buffalo, New York. 

The second way in which care has come into my work recently is through engagement with artists, scholars, radical activists. I was recently giving a talk to this group called 16 Beaver Street, based in New York. Some of them are left visual activists, and who out of the blue invited me and an older Kashmiri diaspora activist to be part of their assembly. It made me think about and ask them what made them care about Kashmir? Why do they care about a place which is so far away, and what kind of responsibility it puts on my shoulders? My concern was to make them understand the commonality of different situations of injustice so that they can begin to, you know, not only understand, but engage and participate? I think the discussions were fantastic in terms of how we began to understand the singular realities of our situation and the multiplicity of singularities that are emerging around the world, but also the sense of common resonance that's taking place where people are understanding in each other's situation their own precarity and insecurity and their own struggles. So that was another thing that made me think really deeply about this group and also about care. 

Finally, you know, there’s an important narrative around what's happening in terms of technology and how states have developed a reach even beyond their own national boundaries. They can reach us far away from the shores of the country. We are now being told, as scholars, as professors, as actors and artists, that we need to “be careful.” And so I was just thinking about what it means being hailed by this disquieting dictum, and what it does to us on an everyday basis. To look over our shoulders all the time in the digital world — what can be said, what cannot be said, and by who. It just makes one really wonder how we might have to imagine new lines of flight from this sort of society of control that is being created. I speak as a Kashmiri scholar here in the U.S., yet feel tremendously insecure in terms of what can happen far away from where I grew up. 

Mohamad Junaid is Assistant Professor, Sociology, Anthropology, Social Work at MCLA.

Erica Wall:  A lot of our programs at BCRC have revolved around this idea of ‘Why care? Why care about what's going on beyond your space?’ I think, especially for our students, I've been really figuring out, you know, we're talking about a lot of things that require a motivation to care. And how do you consistently and vigilantly, vigilantly invest in something that you don’t care about? Why would you care? It has to come back, usually, to how it affects you. So that's just really interesting to me, because when we think about all these things, what is it that we convey either through our programs, these visual cues that really stir people, to not just consider care, but to care, because caring means that you're willing to take action and do something. 

And there's a lot of that right now. And so we're bombarded with all of that. You have to choose. There has to be motivation. And I think that's been really interesting to me. Some of us in the Advisory Collective are busy working on the Carrie Mae Weems project, “Resist Covid.” Again, that's another issue of caring. It brings us to conversations we've had on our own campus about how we provide for the care of our students and their own physical and mental well-being. And we realize that a lot of times it's not just about the resources that you have available to them, but the feeling that they are worthy of care enough to go and pursue it, to go get the help that they need — and for other people to care enough to make sure that they get that. For me, this touches on access — access to places, spaces and people — that care for other people.These things have really struck me as do this work — we invest a lot in talking about it, but it's really hard to get people to invest in the action it requires, even for themselves. 

Erica Wall is the Director of MCLA’s Berkshire Cultural Resource Center (BCRC).

Allie Foradas: I am currently in the process of recording a new podcast at MASS MoCA. We’re releasing a series of conversations with artists in the visual and performing arts who have worked on new projects at or for the museum. (It's part of the Made at MASS MoCA umbrella.) One of the things that I have been reflecting on—dovetailing with Melanie’s recap of what she's been working on—is the notion of talking as care. Many of the artists that I've been speaking with have been vocalizing that it's rare to have an opportunity...not so much to talk about the work, but to talk about the process of making it in a public way. It has been really fun to make space for that. [At the end of each session, I ask artists] what questions they wish people would ask of them, and their answers have been so thoughtful and moving. It has made me think that questioning is also a big piece of how we give and receive care. 

Allie Foradas is a Curator of Visual Art at MASS MoCA.

Guangzhi Huang: As a foreigner, I am interested in how the American society has become so divided that it seems that each side has stopped caring about opposite side, which prevents this society from moving forward. As someone from the political left and an instructor in urban studies, I want to help students understand why it is hard for those on the political right to care about people who do not conform to their values and the role of urban designs in contributing to this divide. In this past year, I stressed more the historical processes that destroyed communities and reduced public spaces in many of my courses. Suburbanization, urban renewal, the rise of gated communities, the privatization of public space, and the social turn toward individualism all serve to segregate the American society both spatially and psychologically. This lack of care today is really the manifestation of these mutually constitutive divides. Spatial segregation creates psychologically distance, which in turn generates support for spatial separation. But by depriving ourselves of opportunities and shared spaces where people with different political perspectives can meet, exchange, or even clash, people are bound to become more parochial and unable to listen and care about others' perspectives. This is how I have been thinking about and conceptualizing care in my own work. 

Guangzhi Huang is an Assistant Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies at MCLA.

Amanda Tobin: In my role at MASS MoCA, I oversee our school partnership program, which in ‘the before times’ centered on supporting field trips. The question of care has become even more paramount in this work during the pandemic, with the enormous burden placed on teachers and the ongoing trauma of remote learning and social distancing that children are experiencing. This year has been a delicate balancing act of trying to develop virtual museum resources that can support students’ holistic development and teachers’ learning goals, without adding stressors or requirements. What has come out of this effort is something I hope the museum field can hold onto after we come out of this mess, a sense of what is “enough,” and what success looks like. We usually try and show that we’re serving more and more students every year, because funders typically like to see that kind of growth, and this year we are reaching drastically fewer students — but I’ve worked so much more closely with art teachers to do so, that the experience, even while virtual, is much more in line with what their goals are, and is paving the way for greater collaboration moving forward. We also just made the difficult decision to cancel one of our most popular programs, the Teen Invitational, a pop-up exhibition of high school student work. Even with a scaled-back vision for this year’s event, we just kept hearing more of the inequities and challenges of remote and hybrid learning across the 9 participating schools: some of which have had students in the art room, but most of which have not; some of which have been able to distribute art supplies to students at home, but most of which have not, and so on. It became clear that the act of care in this moment would be to simply not hold the program, which is really antithetical to how we are accustomed to operating. This year has shaken us out of our routines and helped us continue to pay close attention to what our audience’s needs are.

Amanda Tobin is the former Associate Director of Education at MASS MoCA.

Zack Finch: The other day I was reading the transcript of a talk given by D.W. Winnicott to a group of doctors and nurses in 1970. The talk was titled “Cure,” but instead of focusing on the idea of cure-as-remedy that undergirds much of the medical profession, Winnicott emphasized the work of cure-as-care, an idea which he had formulated in his career as a psychoanalyst.  “Psychoanalysis is not just a matter of interpreting the repressed unconscious,” Winnicott said; “it is rather the provision of a professional setting for trust, in which such work may take place.” This struck a chord with me because as a professor of creative writing, it is my first challenge — to foster a “facilitating environment” based upon reliability, trust and an ethos of professional care.  This is always the challenge or goal of teaching, but it has felt much more pronounced in my collaboration with undergraduates during the pandemic, when we’ve been so spaced out from each other. 

Despite or maybe because of the challenges of the past year, I’ve felt a renewed sense of gratitude that this kind of teaching is my beat.  In the end, I do agree with Winnicott’s talk on cure-as-care, as well as his assumption that “a sign of health…is the ability of one individual to enter imaginatively and yet accurately into the thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears of another person; also to allow the other person to do the same to us.”  At the same time, such a desire for empathic projection and communication is tempered dialectically by another truth: that deep communication can feel threatening particularly for people who are survivors or who live with trauma on a daily basis. “At the centre of each person is an incommunicado element,” Winnicott wrote elsewhere, “and this [centre] is sacred and most worthy of preservation.” I think that care enters into my professional work most clearly in my attempt to fashion, with and for students, the sort of holding environment that can balance and support both needs: the need to communicate and the need not to communicate. 

Zack Finch is Associate Professor, English & Communications at MCLA.

Ronna Tulgan Ostheimer: At the Clark Art Institute, we have a working definition of “art” – the reflection or expression of human experience, imagination, and values” (including the experience, imagination, and values of the visitor) which informs all of our work in the education department. We see our job as engaging people with art rather than teaching people about it; based on our definition, engaging with art involves exploring and contemplating what it means to be a human being. The goal of our work then, involves encouraging people to be more aware of humanity – their own, each other’s and in general – and with awareness, to care. We consider conscious caring, both caring about humanity and caring for people, as one of the signature qualities of our practice. All our programming - from a primarily didactic Highlights talk to an interpretive focused Reflections talk to our open-house community events - is informed by this understanding.

Ronna Tulgan Ostheimer is Director of Education at The Clark Art Institute.

Learn more about the CARE SYLLABUS advisory collective on our About page.