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  "textContent": "Caring in Networks: Reflections on Archetypes and Axioms of Collaborative Practice\n\nOriginally published by Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, 2020. Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.\n\nAcknowledgements\n\nThis project would not really have been possible without the whole village of support that I received. At every point in my project there were people that picked me up, gave new directions, compensated for my weaker phases and supported me. My parents and Merlyn have always been supportive despite Srishti being a huge risk to take and that is something I’ll always be grateful for. My support systems were many and amazing and I hope they will forgive me if I forget to mention someone. Paul, Naveen and Shreyas have always been the wind at my back, comforting me when things got overwhelming. They opened up so many different ways for me to articulate my thoughts. The breadth and depth of their knowledge is only matched by the volume of their compassion. In Bidar, Supriya, Dilip and Vinay took really good care of me and showed me my thesis in practice and showed me how persistence transforms a place. They will be my lifelong inspirations for this. Ruksana Ma’am was an encouragement to me in this sense as well. Her knowledge, compassion for the world and her view on things have changed many things in me. A large group of my peers and friends have been the safety net on which I have so often relied on. The writing group created and moderated by Thomson was immensely helpful in helping me vent when necessary. Veda, Nishita, Siddhant, Malini, Koumudi, Baishnabi,Thomson,Chandra, Shreya, Sweta, Mahima, Sanket have constantly helped me clarify my thoughts, given me support and helped me look at things from a different perspective and teaching me about why collectives have strength. Ayan, Preshit, Maria, Oindrilla, Subhashmita have helped me keep sane during the lockdown. David, Naveen, Mufteeb and Vishnu were constant companions in the last month of the race - keeping things from getting overwhelming and always being people I could rely on to shift my viewpoints. Even though we didn’t talk much about the project, Padmini was always a north star for the things I was describing. Ishita helped me out a lot by sharing her experiences of collectives and what she has lived and loved in them and discussing my ideas through her experiences. I owe a lot of these possibilities also to Rohini, who has looked after and nourished my mental health through these two years-she is a gem of a person. Also repeat shoutout to Paul and Shreyas.\n\nLots of strength and hope to you all.\n\nPreface\n\nThe systemic nature of the issues we face has been revealed through the various breaks, in reality, we are seeing all around us. I experienced this from working in Wayanad with the budding network of research and design. During the studio, I studied how the socio-economic situation of the Paniya tribe was being reinforced through histories of oppression and ahistoric policies (Suchman 2018).\n\nMore and more we are realising that the non-linear nature of these issues and each factor feeds into other factors and create loops of reinforcement or depreciation. This also means that band-aid solutions often end up worsening the problem because of the interactions between the different factors and stakeholders in play. It also makes systemic issues much harder to see and much easier to dismiss the number of factors involved in each systemic issue and how densely interlinked they are.\n\nThrough a studio about future studies, I explored how the systems that surround us so ubiquitously are wrongly attributed to a positivist view of human civilisation. Our progress was never linear but plural. The systems that come into power and the mainstream are often chosen based on existing hegemonies and sometimes sheer luck and are seldom an indicator of quality. Rather they are an indicator of what metrics took importance to whom at what point of time. This leaves ghosts of systems that could’ve been and never realised. The presences and absences of alternative ways to make sense of the world affect the way bodies are structured or collectivised. Through a conscious effort to speculate about these ghosts, we try to surface alternate ways of do-ing and be-ing while also suggesting that ‘this’ isn’t the ‘natural’ way of things. The saying that a fish doesn't know about the water till its outside is an apt metaphor for how much this ubiquitousness blinkers us. It is a clouding of vision in a temporal sense and restricts the way we see the past, present and the future.\n\nCally Gatehouse summarises this using the way that Jacques Derrida and Mark Fischer talk about the concept of Hauntology.\n\n“Hauntology is a term coined by Jacques Derrida that ‘supplants its near-homonym ontology, replacing the priority of being and presence with the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive.’. Cultural critic Mark Fisher has identified two hauntological patterns through which virtual entities come to act upon the present: the first is something that is no longer present, but still has an effect even after it is gone. This can manifest itself in a compulsion to repeat what has gone before. The second is something that is anticipated, but never manifested. This anticipation can also shape our behaviour, even if the thing anticipated is never realised. Speculation, as a practice that aims to generate previously unanticipated futures, could be understood as an attempt to reconfigure these patterns so that both futures and past might manifest themselves differently” (Gatehouse 2020)\n\nThrough the future studies studio, I explored the various socio-political alternatives that could have arisen in pre-independence India. Furthermore, how these alternatives would affect the technological realms that are in place in our country today. Our worlds are made of many human and technology linkages in every aspect of our life. I use technology as more than a modern digital electronic tool and more as a term encompassing made objects and the socio-material systems that guide them. However, like Lucy Suchman shows in her talk “Relocating Innovation: Places and Practices of Future Making”, the visions of these made objects are blinkered temporally by limiting the historicity of technology (Suchman 2018). These same ‘blinkerings’ apply to humans, their bodies, societies and the relations between these. The neoliberal capitalist view of the world as a linear progression or even a geometric progression like that Moore’s law(The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica 2020) is something that I hope to challenge at least in the slightest way.\n\nIn this paper, I aim to offer a glimpse of different epistemology for collaborative networks from the position of centring the various collectives that we belong to. Much has been said about care, but I hope to contextualise my experiences in the theories of care from medical anthropology, political actor-network theories, feminist geography and science and technology studies. Through this research, I hope to present a reimagination of hierarchical practices in networks, of typologies of collectives and institutional practices that are ‘new’. I present the different manifestations of care that I observed, embodied, built for and encountered in networks. I have, through my time at Srishti approached collaborations and networks and studied how they addressed whatever issues they were formed around.\n\nThrough a studio in Wayanad, I explored ways of helping tribal children speculate about futures with children from other castes as a way to destigmatize caste. The project was important for me to understand systemic perspectives and how issues play into each other. Another project in Bihar with early childhood care involved understanding the links between caste and spacio-linguistic access to education. In partnership with Project Potential, we were on field with youth from the district and were lucky enough to talk to them and have them talk to us about the research. Working with groundwater fluoridation in Chikkaballapur helped me understand the value of middlemen in the support and maintenance of the network. INREM and a network of people, practices and organisations were working to solve this. It was amazing to witness how much longevity matters to field engagement. As a part of my Transdisciplinary studio, I was exploring conflict and care across systems to answer existential questions that were close to me like “Can we actually hope that we can deal with Climate Change and all the conflicts that it will bring?”. Through the fieldwork for the capstone, I explored how collaborations and networks can work from practices of care and use conflict and care to deal with important issues. Through all of these experiences, I grew closer to the idea of redefining how we work within our collectives. How do we practice caring for the world through these collectives while also making sure that the collectives themselves were cared for? This involves a lot more work than caring for the individuals within the collective and often about understanding that care for the individual rarely has benefits for the collective. Annemarie Mol puts this succinctly, “care for collectives tinkers with the conditions in which they live” (Mol 2008, p. 68). Through the paper, I explore what this means for the everyday lives, the places of these collectives and their practices.\n\nIt was a struggle for me to describe and reflect on these practices as I was still learning through most of my capstone how I recognized and responded to these care practices. I intended to flesh out these slices through my capstone. However, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the various privileges that made it possible for me to do the research this way. I come from the privilege of living in a Tier 1 city; higher caste and middle class; neurotypical; able-bodied; cis-het male studying in",
  "title": "Care-full Collectives and their Care Practices"
}