cailloux n°112
care, covid & coquillages
Les cailloux* ont eu 5 ans il y a deux semaines. J’ai du mal à croire que cela fasse aussi longtemps et je me pose souvent la question de pourquoi écrire ici et que faire de cet espace, mais je suis toujours reconnaissante qu’autant de personnes (650 au moment où je vous écris, pour la plupart inconnues de moi) continuent de recevoir et lire ces lettres.
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Un article remarquable sur les conditions de travail de personnes atteintes de la drépanocytose en Angleterre. Je suis tombée dessus en farfouillant dans ScienceDirect et même si ce n’est pas ce que je cherchais, le titre m’a immédiatement arrêtée : On the possibility of a disabled life in capitalist ruins: Black workers with sickle cell disorder in England, par Simon M. Dyson, Karl M. Atkin, Maria J. Berghs et Anne-Marie Greene.
To be considered reliable in a capitalist ecology is to conform to formal reliability (being present and on-time are key components of employability). However, where fluctuating unpredictable illness characterises one’s experience, what is important is substantive or entangled reliability, a reliability that is relational to one’s body, as well as to one’s family and one’s community. At the funeral of Kevin, who did not live to see this research, one eulogy noted he could always be relied on to be there (Fieldnotes, October 27, 2016). Our view is that the orator meant this, not in a calculable rationalist capitalist sense, since the same orator recounted Kevin’s brief, unsustainable stints of work in a shop, in IT, and as a security guard, but in the Ricœurian sense of constancy to core values over time, of virtue ethics, being available to others when he could be, that is, whenever he was not himself unwell. Our research represents a window on the precarity of capitalist employment in general, but we need to distinguish between wage-labour, a decidedly one-sided offer of precarity, and mutual precarity, as the ethical basis of caregiving and receiving.
Les auteurices proposent une analyse qui critique les valeurs de volonté et d’indépendance et replacent plutôt au centre de leur pensée les notions d’enchevêtrement et de réciprocité. Ils étendent les concepts d’Anna Tsing tel que “salvage accumulation” (ou “accumulation par captation / récupération / appropriation” en français) : de la même façon que le système capitaliste repose sur l’exploitation de ressources communes comme l’eau, les terres ou le pétrole par exemple, le marché du travail néolibéral repose sur l’exploitation d’une ressource (la force de travail) dont il ignore tout des modalités de régénération.
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Cet article du blog de Brett Sheffield, sur les effets du COVID long :
When we catch a disease or a virus like a flu, although it can be pretty debilitating for a while, we have an expectation that we’re going to get better. We might spend a week or so in bed. Longer, with some illnesses, but there’s always the expectation, or at least the hope that we will get better and return to our old life as before.
With long term illness, this hope prevents us from taking the actions needed to adjust to our new life and capabilities. Planning for the future requires acceptance of the present, and while ever the hope of getting better stays with us, that acceptance can never come. Me? I’m not disabled. I...And that, dear reader, is how far I got writing this before I burst into tears. Great sobbing floods that make it hard to see or type. My beard is getting soggy. Men aren’t supposed to cry. I had that knocked out of me when I was a boy.
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Le jeu pour faciliter l’apprentissage du Braille :
Lisa Taylor, mum to seven-year-old Olivia, said: “Olivia first discovered Lego braille bricks at school and they had such a big impact on her curiosity for braille. Before then, she found it hard to get started with the symbols but now she’s improving all the time.”
Olivia, who lost her sight due to a brain tumour at the age of 17 months, said: “I can play with my sister. I like writing, building and playing games.”
Taylor said the bricks were easy to use and Olivia’s grandmother was now starting to learn braille alongside Taylor herself, her husband and their four-year-old sighted daughter, Imogen.
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Un jeu de cartes très joli tout illustré d’origamis, les origamis sont de P-Y Gallard et L. Derainne, sur le thème de l’océan, et très efficace, on y a converti plusieurs ami·es en l’espace d’un mois.
Il présente l’avantage d’être accessible aux personnes daltonniennes, grâce à la charte ColorADD qui associe des symboles aux différentes couleurs des cartes.
On peut développer plusieurs stratégies, plus ou moins agressives ; personnellement j’aime les duos de bateaux qui permettent de jouer un nouveau tour immédiatement et collecter les poulpes – d’autres s’en donnent à cœur joie avec les duo requin-nageur pour aller chourrer des cartes dans la main des adversaires…
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Et comme c’est bientôt la rentrée des classes, un petit rappel salutaire par Naomi Fischer :
I talk to lots of parents who are worried about their children. They’ve been told that they are behind, and that they will need remedial help to ‘catch them up’. They say to me, but I’ve been told that my child is behind in X, and they must follow a special programme. Surely that means I have to make them do it? Isn’t that really important?
[…]
We can test an almost infinite number of things, and there will always be those who are below and above the average. That’s how averages work. Imagine that I decided that speed of running up the stairs is an important skill, and I tested thousands of 6-year-olds on it. I could create norms for that age group, and now I can identify 6-year-olds who are behind in stair-running. I can offer them extra stair-running lessons. I can tell their parents that they need to do special exercises to catch them up. I can create a lot of worry about their deficiencies.
[…]
But there’s no evidence that childhood development is age standardised.
Vive le jeu, les expérimentations et les intérêts spontanés (mêmes passagers).
