Everybody Cares: Who is (still) Holding the Baby? – expanding the Hackney Flashers' 1978 exhibition

What are the problematics of an expanded understanding of care? What is at stake when we describe ‘curators, collectors, and dealers’ as undertaking ‘care-work’?

Graeber (2020) discussed the growth of managerial, legal, clerical, and supervisory work (through privatisation and its attendant bureaucracy) at the expense of workers in maintenance, medical, educational, and social care. He described how ‘generations of centrists’ have placed the British Labour Party in an unreconcilable position —representing the interests and sensibilities of both carers and administrators—incorporating ‘both the teachers and the school administrators, both the nurses and their managers’.

Likewise, Kenway (2021) has warned a lack of specificity about the ‘rich range of unquantifiable skills’ and relationships involved in different kinds of care work is part of how it is devalued by care markets—‘the tasks considered to constitute care become limited to physical activities’; ‘paid care workers have their shifts shortened and their time monitored, forcing their focus to be task-oriented rather than relational.’ She notes ‘childcare and caring for someone profoundly unwell are different—in their daily lived experience, in their outcomes and in the social reactions they provoke’, and that when ‘we elide them’ we make them ‘invisible again’.

This presentation will draw on the work of the Hackney Flashers (1976–78), and its recent re-presentations (2023–4), to consider the impacts of NGOism, the potentials for alternative imagination infrastructures, and how the question of how we care for youngest children has been disciplined in England – from 1970 to the present day.