How can we think (and rethink and rethink) care laterally, in the register of the intramural, in a different relation than that of the violence of the state?
—Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
The Popular University for Gaza encampment at the University of Chicago was raided on May 7, 2024. Following a week of connection, building, and generativity, police officers invaded the physical and figurative structures we had built, ripping organizers out of tents and tearing down the protective walls surrounding them. Just hours afterward, we convened together to make sense of it all—to begin the processes of recovery and rebuilding. Through circles that met in-person and virtually in the weeks to come, my peers brought care to the forefront of our work, inviting rage, grief, hopelessness, longing, intimacy, and joy into the relationships forged during the encampment. Our encampment existed in its physical form for only eight days, but the work of caring for one another has extended far past the date on which our physical structures were destroyed by the police. Care work that was seeded within the walls of our Popular University has sprung up from the ashes of the camp. This foundation of care continues to shape the way we organize against all forms of state violence.
As we collectively pursued divestment from arms manufacturers that directly facilitate settler colonial violence in occupied Palestine, we also developed and deployed principled care tactics. The history and politics of care work are inextricable from the tentacles of empire. For example, the gendered and racialized modes of commodified care that we often think of when we hear the word “caregiver” have roots in legacies of colonial and imperial exploitation. The long legacy of slavery, sharecropping, and domestic laboring in the United States is inextricably linked to the subjugation of Black American women. Caregivers in home health-care settings, nursing homes, and childcare facilities are often precariously employed and underpaid immigrant women or women of color. In this model of caregiving, marginalized care workers tend to the bodies of those insulated from economic and social vulnerability. Simultaneously, most psychotherapists and medical doctors—those who are treated as care experts—are white, hailing from socioeconomic backgrounds that allow them to pay tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for their training. The cost to access this kind of expertise makes it extremely difficult for most of us to afford comprehensive health care and psychotherapy in the US.
This is why a repositioning of care was necessary in the context of an anti-imperial encampment focused on demanding that the University of Chicago disclose investments in war, divest from genocide, and repair injustices perpetrated from Gaza to the South Side of Chicago. Far too often, care means that autonomy gets taken away from someone in need. The state’s violent role in stripping vulnerable people of their autonomy is often labeled “care” or “welfare.” The active repositioning of care as intramural at the Popular University for Gaza created opportunities for peers to care laterally for one another, rather than relying upon individuals positioned as experts or as care workers. Rather than devaluing care or maintaining the power relations that keep it financially inaccessible, our care for one another within the walls of our Popular University created a structure of mutuality and sustainability. Repositioning care as a tool available to all of us was a means of decommodifying it, of taking it out of the imperialist context in which it is normally encountered. This repositioning allowed us to deploy care as a direct and oppositional response to violence targeted at Palestinians and those who act in solidarity with them.
Intramural care—care within the figurative walls of our popular university—generated new ways of relating to risk and relating to one another. As a tool for building political power, care allowed encampment members to negotiate risk together, to workshop and (re)develop strategies for sustainable organizing, and to inhabit a community with a shared commitment to mutual aid and protection.
This exchange of care exemplifies a decommodified mutual aid relationship built upon respect and recognition rather than charity.
Encampments are not a new organizing tactic, nor is thinking about how to provide collective, non-hierarchal, and lateral forms of care. As the Care Collective underscores in their book The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence, treaty camps (such as the one erected at Standing Rock in the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline) also welcomed anyone who adhered to camp values, offering care that was “designed according to need, not profit”—food, education, health care, housing—for everyone in the community.
Following this legacy, the Popular University for Gaza developed a robust care team. At the Popular University for Gaza, our care team comprised of undergraduates, graduate students, neighbors, faculty, and staff. We contributed to encampment operations as medics, group facilitators, mental health workers, conflict mediators, and food and water distributors.
As critical as collecting and distributing vital resources was to the encampment, our care work went beyond mere resource provision. As a social worker, I realized that developing a peer support guide might be a wise way to help campers develop strategies for maintaining the mental and emotional resources needed to keep the encampment running. This guide offered some individual-level tools for emotional regulation and grounding, and it also provided an outline for running processing/decompression circles. These circles were the first opportunity that many of us had to get to know individuals from outside of our programs, student organizations, or housing situations at the encampment. Through this peer support guide, organizers who were not experienced in professionalized care provision were invited into a relational practice, a space of connection rather than a mystified series of expert techniques. These circles were also the first space where we were able to convene after our encampment was violently raided by the University of Chicago Police Department.
I also developed a therapy referral network and the launch of a 24/7 on-call peer mental health line for organizers. To have built this infrastructure outside of the confines of health insurance or state surveillance feels exciting; when we think of care laterally, we realize our own capacity to provide for one another instead of risking increased involvement with a violent state apparatus. Our collective approach to care, drawing from practices of peer support and mutual aid, was a risk-responsive approach grounded in interdependence.
Among the mental health workers on our care team, it was our philosophy that anyone who wanted to run a decompression circle should be able to do so—rather than requiring a license or degree to offer support to peers at the encampment, the only requirement for running a decompression circle was to have first attended one as a participant. With this structure, mental health work was taken up by encampment community members with a wide range of ages, varied prior experiences with mental health care, and a vast array of academic and personal backgrounds. This diversity of experience among decompression group facilitators also allowed us to run affinity spaces for decompression, attending to the more specific needs that might arise among community members of color or disabled community members, for example.
Collective approaches to care at the Popular University for Gaza allowed us to use risk negotiation as a core organizing strategy. When determining our collective courses of action, conversations about arrest risk were central to our strategizing. An arrest obviously has different consequences depending on things like one’s citizenship status, prior criminal-legal contact, race. In the lead-up to any anticipated police presence at the camp, we spoke to one another frankly about who among us would be able to take on more risk, and we made safety plans for those of us who were unable to risk arrest.
Lateral forms of care are also what allowed organizers to sustain over a week of encampment operations; by using a safety planning worksheet (from the Peer Support Guide) in mental health circles and conversations, organizers developed a sense of who they might reach out to in crises, in moments of overwhelm, and in moments of exhaustion. By prompting one another to concretely identify the human infrastructures of caregiving surrounding us, we were better equipped to tap in and rotate out as we struggled to meet the round-the-clock practical demands associated with maintaining and protecting our Popular University.
Finally, a lateral approach to caregiving allowed us to extend our community beyond the parameters of the institutionally defined University of Chicago. A community member without a student, staff, or faculty affiliation was present in the early days of the encampment, helping with construction and encampment operations. He was targeted by university police, and in response, encampment organizers mobilized jail support and a care package for him upon his return. This exchange of care—in the form of care for the encampment’s physical infrastructure and in the form of care for a community member—exemplifies a decommodified mutual aid relationship built upon respect and recognition rather than charity.
In writing about the role of care at the Popular University for Gaza, I do not want to lose sight of the way that these experiments were made possible because we were not under siege. We were not subject to snipers, airstrikes, famine, or water shortages. We had the resources and safety that so many Palestinians have not had access to for months or years. As I foreground my own experiences of care, healing, and building power, I do so with the recognition that this encampment was a political formation designed to disrupt one university’s ongoing investment in genocide.
But the care tactics at the Popular University for Gaza have created an infrastructure for ongoing disruption. Without care, our anti-imperial movements run the risk of replicating the dynamics of colonialism and empire, pushing feminized and non-white individuals into unrecognized care roles and reifying the expertise of the so-called “helping professionals” for those organizers financially stable enough to access them. This experiment in caring laterally for one another is a mechanism to shift the dominant culture surrounding caregiving, turning care into a central organizing approach rather than an adjunctive resource for burnt-out organizers.
Despite the successes of this experiment, there were also moments of failure: we failed to develop a robust set of norms for responding to harassment within the encampment, and we failed to sustain the level of security needed to protect ourselves from an armed police raid in the middle of the night. Although this was an imperfect experiment, it is one that connected me to people I would have otherwise never known, despite our overlapping involvement in the corporate entity known as the University of Chicago. It gave me a laboratory to think and rethink intramural care.
On the morning of May 7, hours after riot police destroyed the tents, art, library, mental health space, medic area, and prayer spaces of our Popular University, I defended my dissertation proposal. After watching videos of my friends and loved ones getting dragged and shoved outside of the walls we had built within the academy—walls designed to foster different ways of relating to one another here—I stepped back into the walls of the University of Chicago. As a developing scholar of the welfare state, I began my proposal hearing with an additional citation, recognizing the learning that I had done in the prior several weeks as uniquely valuable to the work I hope to do in and outside of the academy. I study care provision within and around the walls of jails and prisons, but my approach to my work is forever changed by the relations of care that I witnessed and participated in during the encampment.
After my proposal defense, I walked through the quad, noticing that new patches of grass had been rolled out almost immediately in the hours after police officers invaded and destroyed the Popular University. I paused to take a photo of one patch of yellowed grass in the rectangular shape of a tent; despite their best efforts, a trace of the encampment persisted past the violent attempts to remove it all. As a means of disrupting the university’s predominant ways of being and relating—the various forms of intellectualization, silencing, and disengagement that I associate with neoliberalized higher education—the encampment’s ethic of care was not extinguished by the raid. It persists in the form of spray bottles and goggles that are distributed at actions this autumn, in the debriefing circles and therapy referrals that have continued for months since the encampment was torn down. As a means of protest and critique, this evidence of care has persisted despite the university’s attempts to exterminate it. This evidence of care demonstrates the ongoing commitment of my fellow encampment organizers: to continue using care as a tactic in our work against state violence, against empire. 
Featured image: Photograph of the Popular University for Gaza encampment at the University of Chicago by Brianna Suslovic.