How do we practice collective and self-care?
How might we repair and reheal from societal and historical forms of trauma?
What are the connections between care and repair?
The UCI Humanities Center collaborated with humanities centers across the University of California, including the UC Humanities Research Institute, to explore the concepts of care and repair during the 2023-2024 academic year.
Care has become a widely circulated term, particularly so since the COVID-19 pandemic. How do we practice collective and self-care? What are the connections between care for our health and emotional care? How do we value various forms of care as paid and unpaid forms of labor, especially as this care work tends to be predominantly performed by marginalized social groups, such as women, people of color, and working people?
To practice care in all its various forms strongly suggests experiences of harm. How might we repair/reheal from both individual and societal and historical forms of trauma? What are the promises and limitations of repair through the justice system and religious communities? What might be needed in terms of redistribution of resources and reallocation of power to enable reparations? And what are the connections between care and repair?
These are some of the key questions that the UCI Humanities Center explored through the Care & Repair theme.
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Artist Statement by Thinh Nguyen
"To care for something, in its essence, is to watch over it, to tend it, to protect it—and at times, to let go of it; to repair entails a reorganization—a shift to re-align, to heal, to transform. Both of these acts share a common thread: the impermanence. Ikebana (“to give life to flowers”), is a Japanese practice of floral arrangements that connects the idea of Heaven, Humanity, and Earth, expressed through line, color, and mass. Plants and flowers are mindfully selected and are carefully trimmed and arranged. The beauty of this process is that it is up to the individual to create their own arrangement—albeit with set rules and standards in the practice—and give life to their creations. And simply by engaging in this act, the participant could perhaps carry these lessons within their own lives, as a means to practice caring for others or themselves just as they envision for their floral design. Caring for someone or something can have an immediacy, but repairing a fractured bond takes repeated and consistent care. Alas, that reparation may not be the same as it once was—but that’s the beauty of the impermanence—because there is always a potential for change, so long as one doesn’t stop caring."
Photographing Care & Repair
Undergraduate and graduate students participated in a year-long Care and Repair learning and creative community. Students worked with Mark Leong, an award-winning photojournalist whose photo essays have appeared in National Geographic, Smithsonian, and Time. In addition, Phuc To (doctoral student at UCSD), Rehana Morita (fellow with the UCI Humanities Center), and Professor Judy Wu (director of the Humanities Center and C-LAB) supported the students' creative process as they explored the annual theme.
Participants explored key questions of why and how we can practice collective and self-care, and how might we repair/reheal from both individual, societal and historical forms of trauma. Through regular meetings and discussions, the community had the opportunity to:
- read, discuss, and research the concepts of care and repair during the fall
- develop art projects, particularly through photography during winter quarter under the mentorship of award-winning photographer Mark Leong and UCI alum Phuc To
- exhibit projects at an end-of-the-year showcase in the spring.
Spring 2024
An emotionally raw memoir about the crumbling of the American Dream and a daughter of refugees who searches for answers after her mother dies during plastic surgery. Author's talk with Susan Lieu, presented by the Humanities Center and Humanities Core.
Detroit in the 1980s was a volatile place to live, but above the fray stood a safe haven: Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine, where anyone—from the city’s first Black mayor to the local drag queens, from a big-time Hollywood star to elderly Jewish couples—could sit down for a warm, home-cooked meal. Here was where, beneath a bright-red awning and surrounded by his multigenerational family, filmmaker and activist Curtis Chin came of age; where he learned to embrace his identity as a gay ABC, or American-born Chinese.
A conversation with Rita Nakashima Brock, Theologian and Senior VP for Moral Injury Recovery Programs at Volunteers of America.
Moral injury focuses on appropriate moral responses to experiencing or perpetrating devastating harm in such situations as war, pandemics, natural disasters, torture, or betrayal by trusted authorities or leaders in high stakes situations. This discussion explored what we all can learn from the challenges veterans face finding their way back into civilian society, especially when the society itself is riven by controversy, division, and moral distress.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Legal Philosophy, Susan Samueli School of Integrative Medicine, and Veterans Services Center
Fall 2024
Introduction: Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Associate Dean, School of Humanities
Moderator: Tyrus Miller, Dean, School of Humanities
Speakers:
- Jonathan Alexander, Chancellor’s Professor, English and Informatics, and Director, Humanities Core
- Omotayo Balogun, MPH
- Malia Baricuatro, Doctoral Student, Global Studies
- Rehana Morita, Undergraduate Student, Asian American Studies and Film & Media Studies
- Rocío Pichon-Rivière, Assistant Professor, Spanish and Portuguese
- Kelli Sharp, Associate Professor and Chair, Dance and Director, Medical Humanities
