Just Care

Messy Entanglements of Disability, Dependency, and Desire (D/C: Dis/Color)

By: Akemi Nishida

Narrated by: Jean Carlson

Just Care is Akemi Nishida’s thoughtful examination of care injustice and social justice enabled through care. The current neoliberal political economy has turned care into a business opportunity for the healthcare industrial complex and a mechanism of social oppression and control. Nishida analyzes the challenges people negotiate whether they are situated as caregivers, receivers, or both. Also illuminated is how people with disabilities come together to assemble community care collectives and bed activism (resistance and visions emerging from the space of bed) to reimagine care as a key element for social change.

The structure of care, Nishida writes, is deeply embedded in and embodies the cruel social order—based on disability, race, gender, migration status, and wealth—that determines who survives or deteriorates. Simultaneously, many marginalized communities treat care as the foundation of activism. Using interviews, focus groups, and participant observation with care workers and people with disabilities, Just Care looks into lives unfolding in the assemblage of Medicaid long-term care programs, community-based care collectives, and bed activism. Just Care identifies what care does, and asks: Are some people’s needs more sacred and urgent than others?

The book is published by Temple University Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.

©2022 Temple University-Of The Commonwealth System of Higher Education (P)2024 Redwood Audiobooks

Critic reviews

“Will be a touchstone for those of us who imagine another way forward in caring for each other on this planet.” (Moya Bailey, Northwestern University)

“This deeply moving account of care work is a critical intervention in prevailing debates about care, capitalism, disability, and futurity.” (Premilla Nadasen, Barnard College)

“Provides a thick, textured, and sharply critical account...we need this book now.” Alison Kafer, author of Feminist, Queer, Crip)