In this workshop Disruption Network Lab are starting from the collective work on the Pirate Care Syllabus to present and delve deeper with participants into a variety of disobedient practices of care in light of their political and technological character. They will, specificially, focus on piracy, division of care labour, and civil biodisobedience.

Pirate Care is a transnational research project and a network of activists, practitioners and scholars who stand against the criminalization of solidarity & for a common care infrastructure. Convened in 2018 by Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak, the project wishes to map and connect collective practices that are emerging in response to the neoliberal “crisis of care” — a convergence of processes that include austerity, welfare cuts, rollback of reproductive rights and criminalisation of migration. In response to that denial of care, imposed by the states and the markets, practices we have called pirate care are organising to help migrants survive at sea and on land, provide pregnancy terminations where those are illegal, offer health support where institutions fail, self-organise childcare where public provision does not extend to everyone, liberate knowledge where access is denied. Crucially, they share a willingness to openly disobey laws and executive orders, and politicise that disobedience to contest the institutional status quo.

The aim is to foster collective learning processes from the situated knowledges of these practices and together with the practitioners of pirate care we have been working on a collaboratively-written Pirate Care Syllabus and in the early period of the pandemic on a set of notes documenting organising of care titled “Flatten the Curve, Grow the Care“.