CARING, MENDING, CLEANING: IMAGINING MORE JUST COMMUNITIES OF CARE THROUGH THE DOMESTIC WORKERS COALITION AND KANTAMANTO MARKET

Responsibilities for providing care are unevenly dispersed geographically, and often along racialized and gendered lines. Expanding market relations, associ- ated with neoliberalism, facilitate globalization and create complex webs of care, while simultaneously embedding labor in a logic of disposability. Using examples of Seattle’s Domestic Workers Coalition and Kantamanto in Accra, Ghana, one of the largest secondhand clothing markets in the world, we explore the ways that workers resist the devaluation and disposability that occur within their webs of care. This agency is highlighted when the bodies of literature around care ethics, communities of care and commoning are read as a framework for understanding these workers’ current situations. We employ critical care ethics in response to counter the dispos- ability and devaluing that have occurred under neoliberal capitalism. Communities of care highlight the role of relationality and worker activism in resisting the dispos- session and devaluation that take place within their webs of care. Finally, incorpo- rating commoning, a sustainability literature, we imagine communities of care which show that our interdependence and existence in networks of care are central to the human condition and pivotal to both survival and flourishing.