Sorgende Gemeinschaften: Performative Praxis des Miteinander-Sorgens

This article examines how “other caring communities” emerge through collective action and in response to the current crisis of care. It explores how these communities take shape through performative and embodied practices of caring with in everyday life under conditions of social marginalization, and how forms of collective responsibility develop in the process that simultaneously expand and challenge existing care arrangements. As self-organized alliances, other caring communities respond to the scarcity and unequal distribution of care resources. They renegotiate care responsibilities, relationships, and roles beyond institutional, familial, or market-based forms. The article conceptualizes other caring communities as embodied, relational, and politically significant formations constituted through shared interdependencies. To this end, it brings Judith Butler's concepts of precarity and precariousness, as well as performative alliances, in dialogue with Joan Tronto's ethics of care. Situated within a post-structural materialist framework, this conceptual synthesis links macrostructural conditions of inequality with micropolitical practices of care. Drawing on illustrative examples from informal support for refugees in public and private spaces in Brussels, the article demonstrates how everyday practices of caring with generate temporary, fragile, yet transformative communities, that challenge existing power relations while experimenting with alternative modes of care and social togetherness. We seek to think, and to be forced to think, by new forms of relation that might emerge from our collective experimentation. We seek to find ways to make the interdependencies of our webs of receiving, making and providing more visible, and thus to open up new spaces for commoning across the boundaries and divisions that have so often been built between us. (Miller und Gibson-Graham, 2020:331)