Caring and Commoning as Cooperative Work: A Case Study in Europe

This paper offers the related concepts of 'caring' and 'commoning', borrowed from feminist technoscience and feminist political economy, as both values for design and analytical lenses to scrutinize computer-cooperative infrastructures for activist interventions. The paper draws on the empirical work conducted in a European participatory design project confronting risks of social exclusion that result from precarious labor conditions increasingly affecting the European populations. We discuss how the combined concepts of caring and commoning present alternatives to capitalist accumulation, supporting activist and emancipatory aims by shedding light on dimensions related to work, affects, and politics.