Community Care Work: Radical Relational Responses to Carceral Violence

Chapter 3 in Toward Dissent: Accessing Political Struggle Across the Americas, edited by Matthew Edwards

Jade Kai (2026): https://utppublishing.com/doi/book/10.3138/9781487576011

In this chapter, I discuss direct-response mutual aid, resource redistribution, and jail support during the Black Lives Matter protests and the coronavirus pandemic in the USA. I use autoethnographic methods of memory work and visual analysis to evaluate a collection of selected media reports, online fundraising graphics, and images of on-the-ground first aid supplies from my collaborations with anonymous jail support networks. These materials reflect how mutual aid provided community members with food, water, clothing, emotional support, medical assistance, financial aid, and safe rides home for protesters after being released from jail. I use this evidence to position direct-action mutual aid as a life-giving praxis based in radical solidarities of relational caretaking. I also observe the pressing threat mutual aid poses to carceral systems, and thus the need to explore its deinstitutionalizing potentialities. I argue that mutual aid does not abolish police, prisons, or racial capitalism, but does engage in praxis vital to abolition through collective mobilization to meet people’s needs and political education about carceral violence, racial wealth inequalities, and hierarchies of power. My theoretical approach honors the intersection between Black Feminist Abolition thinking and trans care, which show that enabling care through direct-action, rather than biased institutional procedures, moves toward abolitionist futures that unsettle the authority of the state.

Coloniality and contagion: COVID-19 and the disposability of women of color in feminized labor sectors

Journal Article in Gender, Work & Organization Volume 30, Issue 2

Jade Kai & José M. Flores Sanchez (2022): https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12913Digital

Grounded in the historical conditions of epidemics intertwined with state power, we examine the factors that contribute to women of color's high proximity to contagion. We build on significant contributions to scholarship on the racial and sexual politics of work and the colonial history of contagion to argue that colonialism is key in the state's weaponization of illness against entire populations. This is crucial to decipher how women of color in feminized labor sectors, in our case, cleaning services and nursing, confront death during the COVID‐19 pandemic. This transforms readers' understanding of governmentality within public health crizes and the roles of colonial state institutions in administering death in raced, gendered, and classed ways. We conclude that future studies focused on pandemics, labor, race, and gender must account for the ways in which colonialism positions feminized workers as fungible in structures of response to mass crizes.

Keywords: coloniality, contagion, COVID‐19, disposability, feminized labor