Pulling Closer: Caregiving as Method, Part 1
This article is the first in a three-part series. Click here to read part 2.
In 2021, the Society of Architectural Historians hosted the workshop Caregiving as Method to explore the role of caregiving in architecture. It was organized by Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi of Barnard College with contributions from Jay Cephas, Lilian Chee, Elis Mendoza, Ikem Stanley Okoye, Itohan Osayimwese, Peg Rawes, and the authors of this series of three articles: Kush Patel and Delia Duong Ba Wendel. These presenters, whose papers were subsequently published were joined in three panels — one each on the topics of Care, Repair, and Method — by moderators Can Bilsel, Garnette Cadogan, and Ana Miljački. The themes and questions animating the workshop were made especially timely by the pandemic but are, in many ways, ordinary engagements with questions of survival and support in contexts of social inequality. The workshop brought forward thoughts on caregiving by scholars whose historical work has been enriched, even defined, by their empathy for, and entanglement with, the care of others.
This article presents a transcript, edited for clarity and length, of the conversation on “Care” that followed papers by Osayimwese of Brown University (“Caregiving in the New England Triple-Decker”), Patel of Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design, and Technology (“Kinship as Keyword”), and Siddiqi (“Scholarship as Mutual Aid”), moderated by Cadogan of M.I.T.
In retrospect, it is clear that the presenters in all three panels grappled most centrally with a question that Cadogan posed early on: what does it mean to think of care as a way of pulling “something” closer, or pulling others closer to you?
The dialogue that follows teases out the threads of an answer through bolded text. It is accompanied by a bibliography, compiled by the presenters, that maps sources of inspiration for the conversations. We encourage readers to engage with it and the transcript below in any order. In assembling and emboldening those perspectives, this series seeks to model an act and method of care. It offers scaffolding for a scholarly commons: a means to read and draw connections to a range of work.
Garnette Cadogan (GC): Notions of time and temporal intimacy thread these papers. Often, we think of care as a reparative act, as a way of countering neglect. So often, too, when we think of care, we think of space, of infrastructure — whether it be a physical or social infrastructure. But for the presenters, care is not merely about space. Alongside the idea of shared space, they show us a way of sharing time, of inhabiting time differently, more intimately. There is also an understanding of care as embrace. What does it mean to think of care as a way of pulling [something] closer or pulling others closer to you? What does it mean to inhabit time more intimately, more repetitively, such that repair emerges from that embrace?
The papers touch on architectural objects that could be classified as vernacular [spaces of home, kinship, and refuge]. But that is not at all the conceptual frame they wish to bring to the work. Instead, they foreground the limitations of categories like “vernacular architecture” and resituate building practices within larger contexts. The notion of community engagement performs similar labor. In U.S. universities at least, community engaged pedagogy and scholarship have become an important aspect of scholarly practice, and in schools of architecture this most often manifests itself as the design-build studio. Instead, the authors on this panel offer what might be described as “community-engaged history.” In turn, the authors shed light on what new methods of community engagement might be required of historians.
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi (AIS): One thing that Garnette and I have been talking about on the side is how these three presentations bring up inhabitation — a way of thinking about care, even scholarly care, through time, rather than in space alone. What does it mean to talk about architecture through inhabitation? I write a lot about this question in refugee camp spaces where time is really controlled. Whether in the past or the present, clocks don’t mean the same thing as time. (And here I'd also draw everyone's attention to the 2021 issue of The Funambulist, “They Have Clocks, We Have Time”).
Itohan Osayimwese (IO): The issue of time is one that's really pertinent to scholarly work, and that we tend not to spend a lot of time thinking about as architectural historians. We have a very strange relationship to time in our work. On the one hand, we think of ourselves as folks who work with deep time in the sense of not contemporary. But also, time is very abstract for us as architectural historians and what caregiving as method and my recent work have taught me is the importance of slowing down, freezing time. Caregiving somehow evokes or enables or causes just that different relationship to time that Garnette suggested.
I expected caregiving to slow down time, and I thought that would have a negative impact on my scholarly production. But in my case, two forms of time started to coexist: historical time and moments for slowing down, and for creating time for community. That intersection was what I was trying to bring forward with the two images in my paper: a 1901 photograph of black and white children in Cambridge, Mass., playing together in front of their double and triple deckers; and the contemporary photograph of double and triple deckers in the same neighborhood. So this doubling of time is something that we should think about more.
Kush Patel (KP): The notion of care as embrace is powerful. And I find myself thinking about forms of co-authorship in the writing of histories and how the act of care as embrace is also a becoming of the plural in how we write histories and how we study contexts. Here I find myself thinking with the writings of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, a self-described queer, autistic, and disabled nonbinary femme writer, disability and transformative justice movement worker, curator and educator of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Roma descent, who beautifully talks about care webs that have existed through time within queer and disabled communities. Care webs assume a form of collective practice or may just stand for life itself. Here, they may refer to how scholars, community members, and activists look out for each other to claim access to both scholarship and “the archive,” or knowledge that is produced. Care as embrace is, for me, an invitation to centralize care — not as additive, or something that we encounter external to scholarly work — but as the stuff of collectives: the hard work of caring for and with each other in research and writing. Care as embrace is an invitation for me to really challenge myself, to think more deeply about and reflect on modes of co-production that have otherwise not been valued in scholarship.
GC: Listening to everyone and reflecting on what Itohan mentioned, I am thinking of what journalists say when they're interviewing: that you don't want to get the front porch interview — that is safe. Instead, journalists want to be in the kitchen, where people are intimate and open; comfortable and at ease. So often, people talk about the difference between the front porch and the kitchen in terms of space. But this difference really is about time; it is inhabiting that space that allows a kitchen to be where you want to have a conversation, ask questions, read body language, exchange, laugh, and swap secrets. This opens up a wholly different architectural intervention: what might it mean for us to move from the porch to the kitchen?
Ana Miljački (AM): It seems to me that everyone's presentation incorporated Kush’s idea that we are all implicated in ways of knowing. I find this to be a really important issue. Maybe we are all also asking: what constitutes an archive and what constitutes valid knowledge for architectural historians? How do you question both when the self is also implicated in ways of knowing? I’m thinking about the different kinds of archives that we have inherited. Are we, in a way, suggesting a caring pushback to build another kind of archive, what Kush called “post-custodial”?
KP: The idea of the post-custodial archive is still an ongoing political inquiry for me as I engage with histories that are left out and objects or everyday lives that are unseen in the communities that I work with. What I have started doing, as a first step, is to begin to co-author pieces where interlocutors and knowledge keepers are not in the acknowledgments section but are themselves the publics of their writing. Post-custodial digital archives allow for this move to happen to some extent, and also raise the question of access. How do you create and work with protocols that are not established by conservative expectations of rigor and originality in scholarship, but mutually determined with “the community”? And what knowledge then becomes accessible? Or what is it about such an archive to have a sense of ephemerality tied to access and Garnette’s question of kitchen-table care?
Figure 1. A graphic representation of key concepts and dilemmas that workshop participants put forward as central to relationships between caregiving and architecture. Each thematic grouping loosely responds to moderator Garnette Cadogan’s question, “What does it mean to think of care as a way of pulling ‘something’ closer, or pulling others closer to you?” Presenters expanded the themes by collectively assembling a bibliography of related work.
AIS: I think Garnette’s term embrace becomes quite a poetic and constructive way of understanding archival methodology. You can't have an archive without that sense of embrace. With regards to Itohan’s paper, this is really palpable. Hers is a history that would not have been written without some form of intimate embrace of something that could be called an archive.
IO: In architectural history, and in our cognate disciplines, recently, there's been some effort put towards rethinking the archive, but less so towards rethinking narrative voice. And these two are not the same thing. Challenging and rethinking the archive does not automatically breed a new practice of narrative voice; we have to attack these problems distinctly. I'm really interested in the idea of placing self in community, in how to think of myself and my experiences alongside community engagement practices and scholarship. In this regard, I've been thinking about autobiography as a method that is devalued, as Ana implied. There's a tendency to question the validity of an autobiographical voice in the practice of architectural history. I'm wondering if, in our work, which tends to deal with material culture and objects, the relationship between self and objects could serve as a bridge and a way to add value to the autobiographical voice because, for us, self exists in relationship to objects. In my case, I'm thinking about the self in relationship to the double decker or the triple decker. They're not the same thing. But they're connected: the double decker is the space inhabited by my family and my community, and it's also self.
GC: I would also like to speak to this relationship and suggest that actually vulnerability is maybe one experience that is common to all of the papers. By that I mean how we suggest transcending this old masculinist concept of scholarship in which the researcher redeems or values things, or takes a position of ethical resistance or dissidence. All of these are very much embedded within the art and architectural historical narratives. How can we go beyond these ideas of distance to one in which there are different experiences of vulnerability for the researchers and what and who they write about. Maybe that is one point of entry to this very interesting and very difficult question that Ana, Anoo, Itohan, and Kush are asking in regards to what a post-custodial archive is, and what is the different epistemic scaffolding that we are engaging.
Ikem Stanley Okoye (ISO): I'd like to comment on a field neighboring architectural history: anthropology. Anthropologists have been asking these questions for decades — I’m thinking for instance about Johannes Fabian, who wrote Time and the Other. He critiques anthropology and ethnography and their relationships of power to communities they surveilled. There was once a tendency to think of African people as somehow living outside the same chronological moment in which a Western anthropologist might be working. An example of vulnerability that comes to mind in relation to his argument is the experience of art historian, Sarah Brett-Smith, who wrote, The Making of Bamana Sculpture, in which the text is a transcript of conversations she had with the community (though unfortunately facilitated through a translator). Nevertheless, in the opening chapter of the book, she confesses how vulnerable she felt throughout this research, and also how incredibly transformational the experience was for her. That unanticipated vulnerability helped her acquire the cosmological thought patterns of the community in which she worked, so that her approach to certain kinds of objects changed: she became more careful and cognizant of objects that were both sacred and feared in that community. It's a wonderful model of what we've been speaking of, which is: how vulnerable does one make oneself within a community in which one is working? But it also raises questions about the relationship between person and objects, about what it means to regard objects as agents, which contrasts starkly with how a researcher from the global North might think of themself as somehow autonomous from the inert objects they study.
GC: [Audience member] Ishita Shah writes in the [Zoom room chat box]: “Every household or subgroup approaches the idea of care quite differently. All three of your presentations were based on experiences with very different kinds of community groups and spaces. How would you respond to the concept of care which emerges and differentiates itself from one cultural group to another, from one household to another? Would a micro-understanding of care in the socio-cultural and economic context affect or complicate the act of knowledge production? If yes, then are we equipped as architectural historians to engage with such personal politics?”
AIS: I think about the subjectivity and intersubjectivity that you're talking about in terms of how histories are recovered, and then owned, and somehow kept in custody. I think that those subjectivities each produce different threads of time, or different understandings of time, and different understandings of history, which end up in different kinds of narratives. It amounts to more than the critique or denial of a universal understanding of history. There's something else that is at work that has to do with a subjective pulling of a thread of experience.
IO: I want to follow up on Ikem’s suggestion that we think with Sarah Brett-Smith, and connect to Garnette’s question that every household and subgroup approaches the idea of care differently. The principle that I want to put out there is somewhat controversial. It grew out of anthropology’s encounter with these kinds of questions in the 1980s. What emerged was a self-reflexive practice and one of the principles was that the researcher ought not to engage with communities that are outside of themselves, that are entirely alien to them. So, one principle perhaps is to work with communities with which you are familiar. I have come to a moment in my research where I think it's really important for me to write about what I know. One of the ramifications is not writing, and not engaging with, what I don't know. I'm curious about what folks’ thoughts are about this approach.
GC: That question is something we have to spend time with — I wouldn't say reflect on this for next week, because we’d need to give it at least a decade. How do you think about the subjective self? How does the autobiographical self begin to speak about things that are close to or at a distance from their understanding? Do we write in order to know or do we try to step into new worlds and inhabit a way of expanding our imaginations?
Citation
Delia Duong Ba Wendel and Kush Patel, “Pulling Closer: Caregiving as Method, Part 1,” PLATFORM, November 27, 2023.
