In the Communities of Care project, we focus on communities of care in Buffalo to think with study participants about the everyday ways that those impacted by disability, both caregivers and those receiving care, including poor, racialized, and disabled people, navigate and negotiate living, working, and accessing vital healthcare and other needs.
We use “communities of care” to extend our understanding of care networks beyond formalized healthcare settings to include the vital care that takes place in the home, in neighborhoods, and in other settings. We also consider care as work – both in its more formal settings and in the informal spaces in which it most often occurs.
We are exploring the ways in which this work has been/is gendered and racialized and the implications that this has for the formation of caregiving/receiving relationships and worker organizing.
We are creating a permanent digital archive and exhibition space made available to community members, students, and researchers of all levels. We are bringing together community people, artists, and scholars involved in giving and receiving care to share their stories through interviews, creative writing, memoir, and art making, as well as other approaches that interact with the “communities of care” theme.
The Communities of Care project amplifies the voices of those whose stories are not often heard, both the caregivers and those receiving care; and will focus on the intersection of disability, race, and gender.
NEWS AND NOTES
Michael Rembis' new book, Writing Mad Lives in the Age of the Asylum (Oxford University), enables a significant new interpretation of the history of madness and asylums, as well as the people who occupied them. The Department of History recently hosted a special event to celebrate the book, with commentary by Prof. Rachel da Silveira Gorman (York). Learn more about the book.
Victoria Wolcott receives the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities 2025. One colleague described Wolcott as “the most influential and talented historian working at the juncture of gender, race, recreation, and civil rights ideology in modern American.” Learn more about the awards.
