My screen filled with black boxes as my laptop initialized the video-conference app and from a mountain of pillows in bed, I was transported into a silent space. Behind each square was a person tuning in with camera off and mic muted. This was my first time attending a disability support group through the Bellflower Collective.Footnote ¹ I was joining a few minutes past the hour, probably five or six. The meeting’s chat stream slowly fizzed up, creating social motion as those attending introduced themselves. As I typed out my introduction, I could feel something was happening here, something different.

In this essay, I reflect on care ethics as they relate to practices of everyday life. Berenice Fisher and Joan Tronto (Reference Fisher, Tronto, Emily and Margaret1990, 40) have conceptualized a feminist ethic of care as “a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible.” This articulation of care exceeds dominant, capitalist frames of care, which frequently laud care of the self (Casalini Reference Casalini2019) and see care as “a finite good, something that can be exhausted, not a fundamental aspect of the worlds we inhabit” (Adelman Reference Adelman2023). I am interested in the relationships between care ethics and materiality, following Karen Barad (Reference Barad2007), who articulates matter and meaning as co-constituted, encountered as entangled phenomena called assemblages. How meanings come to matter (and indeed, how matters become meaningful) are dynamic processes, emergent through everyday practices: “entangled practices are productive … different intra-actions produce different phenomena.” (Barad Reference Barad2007, 58). Care, then, is a phenomenon which emerges through specific material-discursive assemblages, shaped by the entangled, dynamic mash of people, policies, tools, technologies, and other actors in that assemblage (McDougall et al. Reference McDougall, Kinsella, Goldszmidt, Harkness, Strachan and Lingard2018).

Drawing on my own queercrip life writing, I unravel my encounters with care in virtual disability support groups. The experiences I’ve had in different support groups have challenged and expanded the way I think about the materialities of care, sociality, organizing, and worldmaking. Before, care was a theory to read and use in my scholarship (Wolf Reference Wolf, Harrison, Bardzell, Neustaedter and Tatar2019). But my relation to care is different now. No longer chiefly an academic concern, care now is what keeps me alive; care is how I, as a disabled person, remain engaged with social worlds.

Five years ago, my life transformed after surviving a spinal cord injury. As my bodily experience rapidly changed, so too did my social world. Indeed, I have come to understand disability as a process of disabling participation in dominant modes of sociality: I went from living as a busy, active industrial researcher with a vibrant, international web of colleagues, to an isolating routine centered around medically caring for my body and making do with meager resources. In seeking out the feeling of community I once knew, I began participating in virtual disability support groups. I call these meetings crip care assemblages and note how ethical commitments, norms, and expectations relate to the material specifics in different configurations.

The practice of care is “social because caring efforts speak ultimately to our survival as a species rather than as isolated individuals” (Fisher and Tronto Reference Fisher, Tronto, Emily and Margaret1990, 39); yet, the bombarding, hyper-competitive landscape of neoliberal capitalism tries to neutralize this relational potential, casting care as just another market commodity. Care becomes something we find within the bureaucracies of the Western medical-industrial complex or via ostentatious consumption of “self-care” services. Affectively marketed as having more choice and feeling empowered, discourses touting “free markets” distort concerns of public welfare and collective survival into ones of personal responsibility and competition (Ward Reference Ward, Barnes, Brannelly, Ward and Ward2015). As part of neoliberalism’s disciplining “self help” imperative (Rimke Reference Rimke, Nehring, Madsen, Cabanas, Mills and Kerrigan2020), we are pressured to become entrepreneurial, atomic sites where we advance personal projects of efficiency and optimization. As Maria Puig de La Bellacasa (Reference Puig de La Bellacasa2017, 213) has said, “caring for the self is a pervasive order of individualized biopolitical morality. … People are summoned to care for everything, but foremost for ‘our’ selves, our lifestyle, our bodies, our physical and mental fitness.” Neoliberal care becomes a form of cruel optimism (Berlant Reference Berlant2011): it promises personal flourishing while deepening the alienation of the self from social bonds.

In these informal, peer-led, digitally mediated gatherings, though, care is different. Neither a market service/transaction nor a set of roles (e.g., care-giver and care-receiver), care here is a relational and collective practice. These support group meetings represent embodied, adaptive, and fragile strivings to make things better: “Care is active, it seeks to improve life.” (Mol et al. Reference Mol, Moser, Jeannette Pols, A. Mol and Pols2010, 15). These collective efforts resist neoliberal impulses of singularity and instead foster the interdependence that connects and sustains us as a species.

I call these meetings crip care assemblages because they are spaces organized around centering and valuing disability and disabled life.Footnote ² Informal peer support spaces, like the meetings I participate in, “represent the kind of care that can radically remake worlds … exceed[ing what is] offered by the neoliberal or postneoliberal state” (Hobart and Kneese Reference Hobart and Kneese2020, 3). In peer support practices, we reclaim our selves as social beings. Our voices are heard and believed, affirming us as authorities of our own experiences. This profoundly rewrites the narrative dynamics we experience within industrial systems of care, where expertise and authority become the jurisdiction of medical and insurance workers. Rather than being cast as damaged, resource drains, in peer support, we are seen as worthy, competent, and capable (Wong Reference Wong2017; Piepzna-Samarasinha Reference Piepzna-Samarasinha2018). In these care practices, the horizons of what is possible for us widens.

This potential—for reparative relating, expression, and kinship—is always emergent depending on the material-discursive assemblage. Some groups I participate in are organized around rights-based conceptualizations of access. These forms of organizing, rooted in histories of the Disability Rights movement, often focus on legal or place-based barriers, asking: how do we get everyone here, given various barriers? In this view, offering a virtual option is understood as eliminating barriers and thus achieving access. Other meetings I participate in are organized around the principles of Disability Justice (DJ), evoking a radical, interdependent understanding of access. Access becomes not a box to check, but rather something that is emergent, collective, and must be continually collaborated on. First articulated by the disability performance group Sins Invalid (Berne et al. Reference Berne, Morales, Langstaff and Invalid2018), DJ approaches build on and extend the Disability Rights movement, which has largely been single-issue and led by white people. DJ reaches to genealogies of Black Feminist thought, bringing an intersectional politic to disability organizing (Berne et al. Reference Berne, Morales, Langstaff and Invalid2018). DJ approaches ask: how do we organize in ways so everyone can participate, given each person’s unique and dynamic capabilities, needs, and relations to power? While rights-based organizing centers on getting access to normative spaces and systems, DJ attempts to open up different possibilities of collective being and becoming, provoking us to more deeply wonder: how do we make sense of, contest, rethink, and change normative spaces and systems to prefigure something different?

My first experiences of DJ organizing have been in joining Bellflower Collective online meetings; the ten principles of DJ are read aloud as a communal ritual to begin each meeting, affirming a shared framework and ethical commitment around intentions and behavior in the emerging space: intersectionality; leadership of the most impacted; anti-capitalist politic; commitment to cross-movement organizing; recognizing wholeness; sustainability; commitment to cross-disability solidarity; interdependence; collective access; and collective liberation (Berne et al. Reference Berne, Morales, Langstaff and Invalid2018). DJ organizing espouses a different view of coming together as a collective—one where we are neither asked to simplify our lives for the sake of community recognition nor assimilate in order to achieve solidarity. Through DJ organizing, we acknowledge the complexity of our embodied realities: our lives are messy and the oppression we each live under is carried uniquely and painfully in our bodies. We can honor and attend to these differences, at the same time cultivating the inter-relatedness that flows across us all. Through this paradox, fellowship, belonging, and kinship are possible—as we collectively imagine and enact alternative ways of being and becoming.

Bellflower Collective meetings are often silent for the first ten minutes; this still, quiet period is a deliberate choice. Recognizing the lived realities of crip time (Kafer Reference Kafer2013; Samuels Reference Samuels2017) (the unique relation to time/space experienced by disabled people) and that folks may not be “on time,” this quiet zone also acts as a transition from the sensory demands and dizzying pace of mainstream experiences to another type of space, one set apart. This collective ritual signals a cut from normative social relations and normative uses of video-conference tools, to use the language of Karen Barad (Reference Barad2007). A cut is an assertion of agency that marks the contours of a given material-discursive encounter—the boundaries between objects don’t exist a priori, but instead are dynamically cut from the sociomaterial whole in specific encounters. Cut, in this sense, is like when a printmaker’s stylus cuts an image into a copper matrix (creating an etching plate) or when a blade cuts a tree (creating lumber); but a cut might also be when a wireless telephony network drops a call, for example, or when internet surfing is sharply halted by the return of a 404 error. Barad calls these agential cuts, because cuts both assert agency and implicate the capacity to act. Agency is not something an actor (human or otherwise) possesses; agency is a relationship amidst the assemblage. Agencies then are opportunities (or encumbrances) that dynamically emerge (or fade away) within material-discursive practices, giving shape and meaning to the encounters. As various actors move, torque, struggle, ally, and/or flow, experiences are enabled and constrained dynamically through intra-action. These agencies and energies are political, in that each cut makes visible certain things (while obscuring or excluding others) and enables certain possibilities (while foreclosing others). Attending to the material specifics of crip care assemblages helps us more fully understand what influences experiences of accessing and participating in care practices.Footnote ³

The Bellflower Collective opening ritual continues with each attendee sharing an introduction via voice or chat. Attendees are asked to share their name, pronouns, access needs, and a “temp check.” The temp check is a quick check-in letting the group know how you are feeling in your body today, e.g., “I’m having a bad pain day and lots of brain fog.” Access needs are closely coupled with the temp check, as I might explain on ocular migraine days that I can’t look at screens and will be audio-only (thus expressing an access need that the text of chat messages be read aloud). My access needs might shift—for example, on days when my neuropathic pain flares, it can be painful to use my hands (thus I might express an access need that I will be responding to chat-based dialogue verbally). These round-the-room introductions help foster a sense of access intimacy, what disability activist Mia Mingus (Reference Mingus2011) describes as “that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else ‘gets’ your access needs.”Footnote ⁴

Routinizing the sharing of our individual bodily states brings the group together on a body level, affirming: we all have bodies and our bodies are situated in particular somatics; these specificities shape how we show up and what we need to be able to access the community space. Exposing our needs and bodily states in this way helps the group work together toward collective access. Sharing on a body level is not seen as TMI (too much information), being a “downer,” or complaining, the way such disclosures might be understood in able-bodied settings. We are not expected to show up in a certain way; we do not have to seem to be “okay.” Through these intersubjective flows of energies and affects, our individual bodily experiences are no longer an internal or solitary concern; instead our bodies become a shared, crip matter (Patsavas Reference Patsavas2014; Price Reference Price2015). Rather than atomized and discrete, our bodies are revealed to be, as Rosi Braidotti (Reference Braidotti and Boundas2009, 146) has articulated: “radically immanent, intensive … assemblage[s] of forces or flows, intensities, and passions,” exceeding “the singular configuration commonly known as the ‘individual’ self.” This solidarity across difference is an emanating paradox of DJ: we are at once individuals—with unique needs and experiences—but also simultaneously part of an entangled, relational whole, striving for collective access and community.

I move through the world with slowness and significant pain. Sitting upright is painful for me, so I often lay down to alleviate neuropathic and articular pain, gaining comfort from the feeling of my dog pressed next to me and the lights dimmed or off in the room to lessen headache pain. I nearly always have a heating pad draped around my shoulders and neck, with an ice pack along my spine and joint braces on my wrists and elbows. This arsenal of actors—human and non-human, animate and otherwise—together assemble the entangled, amalgamated entity that is “my body.” Our bodily assemblages emerge in relation to our environments, configuring our capacities to participate in social worlds. From here, I can participate in some worlds and not others.

I have taken part in other disability support groups that do not organize around DJ principles. For example, Balsam Collective meetings are affiliated with a regional rehab center and follow a rights-based view of access (where offering a virtual option is seen to adequately eliminate barriers to participate). In Balsam meetings, specific cuts shape the possibilities of action there. Balsam often holds hybrid meetings, meaning some of the attendees are co-located in a physical room and some join via a virtual video-conferencing platform. This split-mode setup structures access and participation. The co-located participants see the virtual participants on a large projection screen and do not have access to the virtual platform (i.e., no chat); those attending virtually see one video image of the entire co-located room and must use audio to communicate with folks there. In this assemblage, participation must be visual (cameras on) and auditory (mics on). Even in non-hybrid Balsam Collective meetings (where all attendees are virtual), these audio/video norms around participation persist and the chat is neither monitored nor discursively brought into the verbal dialogue.

What are the consequences of Balsam’s narrowed contours of participation? I can only attend when I am feeling well enough to participate normatively via audio/video. Participating this way is taxing for me as it requires sitting upright, with enough light on in my room to be perceived by my laptop’s camera, and enough energy to express myself verbally. As my pain and/or fatigue surge, my capacity to participate in these ways recedes and I often have to leave Balsam meetings early. Through these experiences, I have come to appreciate how the possibilities of crip care emerge (and recede) always in relation to the sociomaterial assemblage—the situated, enmeshed particulars of bodies, technologies, affordances, norms, ethics, and entanglements thereof. It is not the technology itself that structures sociality, after all most video-conferencing platforms share similar features. By attending to the assemblage as an entangled whole, we are able to see how the specific ways that technology (matter) come together with ethical commitments (meaning) in that moment regulate social actions. Participation, as it emerges in Balsam meeting assemblages, reproduces mainstream, neoliberal video-conferencing assemblages where bodies are pressured to perform in culturally typical ways (through video/audio), achieving recognition by displaying social discipline and conformity (Melling Reference Melling2025).

In DJ-informed assemblages, participation emerges differently, allowing alternative forms of expression and kinship to emerge. Attendees are encouraged to choose whatever local configurations of cameras and/or mics on/off feel right for them in the moment; many attendees have cameras off and turn on mics when they share with the group. Many attendees interact only in the text-based chat or through emojis and other reactions. Sometimes I am emoji-giddy, able to revel in queercrip joy (Ingram and Jacobsen Reference Ingram and Jacobsen2024). Sometimes I share, too. Mostly I listen, send responses via text-based chat, and reply to chats in the stream. Sometimes my symptoms change. If I’m fighting an infection or am having a surge in pain, I may spend a Bellflower Collective meeting expressing myself symbolically through the video-conferencing platform’s “Reactions” icons (heart, the Munch scream, and laughing-til-I-cry are my most frequent emojis). The software animates these icons, allowing them to “pop-up” into the meeting space; this configuration creates an opportunity for participation and expression with one click. Other times, I may be quietly present, listening without any outward expression; in DJ-informed spaces, presence is valued as a form of participation. We are accepted as we are—we do not have to perform in a certain way or use the video-conferencing platform in a certain way to be recognized as part of the collective.

To be in the presence of community is itself a care practice and this truth is recognized by the group. Often, during Bellflower meetings, a meta-conversation breaks out about the space itself—sparked one way or another by participants’ shares, erupting into a lovefest, with folks expressing collective gratitude and reflecting on the space we’ve made together and what it means for our lives. Having pathways to be in community, even on days when it is difficult to be in our bodies, is a powerful form of organizing. In the words of poet Cole Arthur Riley (Reference Riley2022, 73): “There is comfort in being welcomed, but there is dignity in knowing that your arrival just shifted a group toward deeper wholeness.”

Through our DJ organizing, we are (re)making what is possible and we are transformed in the process. DJ’s radical view of collective access and interdependency—where all levels of participation, including presence, are enabled, welcomed, and valued—creates opportunities for disabled folks to be involved, relational actors in care practices. There is dignity in being able to access and participate in care practices where we “are not passive recipients, but are actively engaged in the process not only of giving care, but of making decisions about how [we] and others will … spend time together. [We] are not made to feel helpless, a burden or capable only of receiving care from others” (Barnes Reference Barnes2012, 99). These reparative experiences allow us to see ourselves differently; we can dream, speculate, and play around with the horizons of what is possible. DJ spaces are, as Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Reference Piepzna-Samarasinha2022) has articulated, where we can “witness possible futures for ourselves.” “We need to imagine crip futures,” Alison Kafer (Reference Kafer2013, 46) reminds us, “because disabled people are continually being written out of the future, rendered as a sign of the future no one wants.” In our practices of communal care, we are able to foster hope for alternative futures, ones where we not only exist, but where we might exist differently.

Meeting foci dynamically shift as folks share their stories; there is a kinship and spiritual knowing that emerges as we share stories of the grief and isolation we, as disabled people, endure in the painful present. We talk about medical trauma; we talk about medical neglect; we talk about stigma. We hold sacred space to discuss socially taboo topics like suicidality and abuse openly. As we collectively struggle to survive living on the margins, these are matters of concern that our communities are entangled with. Through DJ organizing, we are striving to create collective and intersectional access to community care, practicing what Alexia Arani (Reference Arani2022) has called abolitionist care. We are opening for ourselves small pockets of liberation, where, if only briefly, we glimpse freedom from the carceral institutions we must daily navigate to stay alive—e.g., the disability insurance schemes that scrutinize and regulate our potentials, the Western medical-industrial complex that diminishes our knowledges, and the myriad, pernicious ways low-income lives are reviled in mainstream culture. We are living out the words of Audre Lorde (Reference Lorde1988, 130): caring for our selves “is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

In these support groups, there is no one, singular focus, but the self is not lost in the whole—rather, self is understand as relational and an inseparable part of interdependent crip care practices. How we look at care, and whether we see it as an activity directed toward the self or a relational one, matters. Neoliberal self-care’s focus on the individual depowers care’s radical potential, turning it into a project of self-centered, market-driven improvement that alienates us, rather than relates. Crip care, as I have experienced in DJ organizing, helps to configure us toward more relatedness with one another and away from isolation.

Crip care is also wild, volatile—it is situated. Each time is different and each moment contingent. Technical issues, connectivity problems, distracted or fatigued peer-facilitators, overwhelming emotions, internet trolls. Frictions happen. Crip care assemblages are continually calibrated. We can exalt and cherish these spaces as sacred, at the same time we recognize they are like most things in life, fluid and messy. We embrace this sloppiness, a form of queer mess, as Martin F. Manalansan (Reference Manalansan2014, 99) has described, which “spoil[s] and clutter[s] … the neat normative configurations and patterns … [that] calcify lives and experiences.” Instead, contingency becomes a generative source, offering us the chance to witness things shifting and changing: “Immersion in the indeterminacy and provisionality of multiple intra- and interconnections,” Margrit Shildrick (Reference Shildrick2015, 24) writes, “is not simply the condition of living but the source of flourishing.” This dynamism becomes a source of creative energy, spurring us to wonder: how else might things change?

Experiencing these moments during DJ support groups—of reprieve and fellowship, of recognition, of communion—are how we organize and dream. Through these experiences, I dream of organizing where our bodies—our bones, skin, blood, breath, our wounds, scars, our tender spots and our armor—are understood as entangled, messy assemblages where we trace all the ways we are connected as kin. I dream of organizing where sharing our needs isn’t shameful, but the source of our solidarities and how we cultivate collective access. I dream of organizing where we expand what it means to participate, where non-verbal and non-linguistic forms of expression are recognized. I dream of organizing where pain is never a barrier to being in the healing relations of community. I dream of organizing where we break out of established orders and categorical thinking and find new metaphors and concepts to reveal and strengthen our entangled interdependence. I dream of organizing where the flux and unfolding tumble of everyday life is not a source of fear or something to be controlled but instead where we find creative energy to change our worlds. I dream of organizing, where our dreams are not destinations but rather founts of our persisting. In the words of Jina B. Kim (Reference Kim2025, 163) “we are most dangerous when we dream.”