Centering the Dialogicity of Care: A posthuman exploration of the politics of liveability in alternative organizing

Abstract

This study explores the politics of liveability in alternative organizing a feminist posthuman approach to care. Drawing on an affective ethnographic engagement with a communal sauna in Finland, we illustrate how ‘responses’ to ‘calls’ between bodies, affects, artifacts, texts, norms, and living matter influence organizing by both nurturing and troubling interdependencies between humans and non-humans. We emphasize how these patterns of ‘call-and-response’ reflect the inherent dialogicity of care, which performatively shapes how needs and interests are recognized, and how resources and responsibilities are distributed. We highlight how this perspective enables us to foreground the potential messiness of organizational trajectories, showing how multiple, and at times conflicting, caring orientations emerge and co-exist. We conclude by reflecting on the politics of liveability in more-than-human worlds, with particular attention to the distribution of power and the enactment of voice in alternative organizing.