Work is a primary scene of the crisis of care. Take Care’s second circuit, Care Work, confronts the systemic undervaluing of caring labour by a capitalist political economy whose living foundation is nonetheless maintained by this labour. The work of care is unbound, yet it tends to be associated with private spaces and enclosed institutions. Making care public, Care Work renders the performance of care visible, audible, and haptic. Continuing Take Care’s effort to name care gaps within art institutions, Care Work centres the position of cultural workers with caring responsibilities for children, elders, communities, languages, land, and water. Traversing this circuit are multiple formations of care work: cultural formations—circulating visual communication strategies to counter gendered and racialized stereotypes of the figure of the caregiver; political formations—tracking transnational movements of care work and profiling practices of solidarity within local communities; technological formations—probing the power relations that course through care’s machinization; and corporeal formations—choreographing the affective rhythms and recompositional possibilities of care work. Expanding what counts as the work of care, Care Work responds to the extractivist attitude that care is perpetually available for the taking, a point on which the crises of care and ecology converge, with the proposition that attending to the work of care is integral to a transformational project to reframe “care as infrastructure.” 11Letters & Handshakes, “Care as Infrastructure: An Interview with Ai-jen Poo,” The Blackwood 1 (July 2017): 6-7.

—Letters & Handshakes