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Editorial
This issue includes the rst instalment of a two-part Care Dossier central to Krisis
publications this year. The contributions to the Dossier testify to the various forms
that “care” can take. It was our aim to take seriously Joan Tronto’s (1993) exhortation
that we need to extend care beyond the narrow dyad of interpersonal relationships of
dependency. Many of the contributions to this issue engage with the extensive body
of literature that has emerged from lived experiences of political and social struggles,
primarily from feminists (of colour), which put friendship, love, and coalition-building
centre stage. Others extend the concept of care beyond human beings, to include
non-human entities, as well as our built environment and processes caused by extractive
capitalism. Such an approach allows recasting practices of providing and withholding
care as material, economic, and political and thus to highlight its intertwining with
structural conditions of racism, neo-colonialism, patriarchy, and their particular neo-
liberal inections. While “Care” is central to the articles collected in the Dossier, it also
reverberates within the other contributions to this issue.
Rhiannon Lindgren’s article “The Limits of Mutual Aid and the Promise of
Liberation within Radical Politics of Care” explores the political ambivalences of
mutual aid in times of COVID-19 through an in-depth historical comparison of the
Black Panther Party with the Wages for Housework campaign. The question of if and
how care provides a site of resistance is further examined by Ludovica d’Alessandro
in “Careful Cracks: Resistant Practices of Care and Aect-Ability”, which articulates
a Deleuzian notion of vulnerability that underscores the importance of concrete and
diverse bodies. In “Aective Architecture: Encountering Care in Built Environments”
Linda Kopitz shows how the deployment of care in contemporary architectural design
is entangled with neoliberalism, while also pointing to the political potential of built
environments and their imaginary innovation. The themes of the articles that explicitly
deal with issues of care resonate with the two articles that are adjacent to direct discus-
sions about care. In her article “Verloren normaliteit? Van het verlangen naar autoriteit
naar een Beauvoiraanse ethiek der dubbelzinnigheid,” Maren Wehrle interrogates the
desire for authority by developing Simone de Beauvoir’s notion of ambiguity into a
novel account of normalcy. Finally, Matthias Pauwels’ article “Staging Uncivility, Or,
The Performative Politics of Radical Decolonial Iconoclasm” engages with the Black
Lives Matter movement in Belgium and, more broadly, the performativity of protests
that take aim at colonial monuments.
This issue also includes two interviews. In her conversation with Tivadar
Vervoort and Liesbeth Schoonheim, Estelle Ferrarese elaborates on her recent work
on care, vulnerability, and the importance of a social-constructivist, as opposed to an
ontological, approach to these concepts. Bram Wiggers interviews Jason Read on tran-
sindividuality and the promises of cross-reading Marx and Spinoza. The importance
that Krisis pays to the diversity of genres of social critique is also evinced in the publi-
cation of “Critical Naturalism: A Manifesto.” The authors, Federica Gregoratto, Heikki
Ikäheimo, Emmanuel Renault, Arvi Särkelä and Italo Testa, see this programmatic text
both as a critical intervention in Critical Theory and as an open invitation to further