Interpellating Care: Towards “Sustainable Publics” Through Interdisciplinary Inquiry

Building sustainable publics in Asian American studies requires reflections on what constitutes “public”, how we as individuals and researchers are entailed in these publics, and finally, how we can sustain these connections. Threading together care as a central organizing principle, we interpellate these relationships in theorizing a sustainable public. In this panel, we reflect on notions of care, publics, and sustainability through our interdisciplinary approaches. We situate “care” at the center of narrativizing histories, cultivating ethnographic mutuality, and attending to participatory action research across transnational and postcolonial contexts. We draw upon the conference theme’s call to consciously engage in “cultivating, expanding, and sustaining the public relevance and impacts of Asian American Studies” to discuss how our negotiations around/through care can be understood in developing “reciprocal relationships” and imagining sustainable publics.
We look within and beyond the context of the U.S. to think critically about the mobility and meaning of care through the labors of early childhood educators at the crossroads of racial capitalism and feminist theory (Moon), COVID-19 and elderly care among transnational Filipino communities (Nadurata), the contested politics and history of disability and care in Vietnam as it coalesces with Agent Orange (le), and the medical politics of decolonization surrounding leprosy care in the U.S. colonial Philippines (Acosta). Together, we explore how our scholarly approaches and temporalities address the multivalence of care as a framework in building sustainable publics for addressing asymmetries in global labor migration, the intimate politics of caregiving, and the persistence of historical misrepresentations as a result of imperialism and militarization. Collectively, we ask for what and for whom is sustainability for? Can refusal and secrecy make salient the relationship between sustainability and care?