Communities of care - with Lorraine Krall McCrary
Episode 23 of Careful Thinking
My guest in Episode 23 of the Careful Thinking podcast is the political scientist Lorraine Krall McCrary, who joined me for a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation about disability, politics, and the nature of community.
Lorraine is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Wabash College, a liberal arts school in Indiana, and she's also a research associate at St Edmund's College, Cambridge. She has a doctorate in political theory from Georgetown University and previously taught at Washington University in St. Louis and at Villanova University (which happens to have been the new pope’s alma mater). Lorraine's research brings together disability studies and feminist care ethics, and she also writes about topics in politics and literature, as well as the relationship between the family and politics. Lorraine is currently in the final stages of writing a book based on her most recent research, with the working title Care Communities: Politics in a Different Voice, and I was privileged to have a preview of some of the chapters of what promises to be an important and influential text.
I was introduced to Lorraine and her work by Maurice Hamington, my guest on Episode 6 of Careful Thinking, and a great friend and supporter of the podcast. I was immediately intrigued by Lorraine's research exploring communities of care in which disabled and non-disabled people live together, and by her emphasis on including people with intellectual disabilities and other vulnerabilities in political life. I was also interested to see that one of the communities which featured in Lorraine's research was Camphill, with which I had some contact in a previous role, when I was organising literacy provision for vulnerable adults. And as someone whose original academic formation was in literary studies, I was intrigued by Lorraine’s use of examples from contemporary fiction in her writing. Lastly, I was attracted to Lorraine's work by the fact that among the theoretical resources she draws on is the rich legacy of Catholic Social Teaching, which continues to feature strongly in my own thinking.
Lorraine Krall McCrary
We began our conversation on the podcast by talking about the origins of Lorraine’s interest in the politics of disability, before moving on to discuss the influence on her thinking of the German political theorist Hannah Arendt, and in particular the latter’s concept of natality. Next we talked about the representation of disability in fiction, focusing specifically on what Lorraine has written about the American novelist and short story writer Flannery O’Connor. Another thinker whose name recurs in Lorraine’s writing is the activist and social reformer Jane Addams, who also featured in my conversation with Maurice Hamington in Episode 6. Lorraine spoke about Addams’ pioneering work in public health in Chicago and the lessons it holds for thinking about political action and effecting social change.
Moving on to Lorraine’s most recent work, she talked about her research with three communities of care for disabled people – L’Arche, Camphill, and the town of Geel in Belgium – which forms the basis of her forthcoming book. We discussed the ways in which, in analysing these communities, Lorraine draws both on Arendt’s ideas and also those of the French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville. However, perhaps the most important set of ideas framing Lorraine’s thinking about community and disability are those drawn from Catholic Social Teaching. We were recording the episode shortly after the election of the new pope, who has taken the name Leo in honour of Pope Leo XIII, the author of the encyclical Rerum Novarum, the foundational text of Catholic social thought. Lorraine’s work focuses specifically on the notions of subsidiarity and solidarity, which are also central to feminist care ethics. Lorraine explained how these ideas can also help us understand how communities can go wrong, and how the kind of abuse that has come to light in recent years, for example at L’Arche, can be explained.
In the final section of the episode, we discussed the complex relationship between communities of care and local and state political structures. We ended with the hopeful thought that communities of care might be catalysts for wider social change and the development of a more caring society.
Hannah Arendt Alexis de Tocqueville Pope Leo XIIIThere were some obvious connections between my conversation with Lorraine and previous episodes of the podcast. The question of whether engaging in relationships of care can make us better citizens and cultivate a broader commitment to social justice, is one that I explored in the most recent episode, with Melody Escobar, who has a whole chapter on the subject in her book Revelations of Divine Care. And Lorraine’s critique of the way reason is used as a pretext for excluding certain categories of people from full participation in social and political life reminded me of a similar argument made by Xavier Symons, about people living with dementia, in one of the earliest episodes of the podcast. Both Lorraine and Xavier make the case for a relational definition of reason, and for a broader understanding of what counts as personhood. Finally, the complex relationship between care at the local and community level, and wider social political structures, was another topic that we’ve touched on in a number of earlier episodes. Lorraine’s contention that an over-emphasis on the role of the state in the provision of care risks undermining relationships of care at the local level is something that I definitely want to return to at some point, maybe in a future post.
Here are some quotes by Lorraine from our conversation:
So the idea of natality that [Hannah] Arendt develops...is that there is an action in birth. And in this action of birth, she sees a potential for action, one that, of course, occurs in political public spaces. And she says that this has responsibilities, this natality, this potential for action requires certain things of the social and political world. And really what it requires is welcome for that person and for the natality that they carry...I think...natality could provide us an understanding of what makes us human that’s broader than reason. So throughout my work on disability, I’m really troubled by political theories for a focus on reason...especially in our modern use of reason, it means something very narrow that has been used to exclude people with intellectual or cognitive disabilities.
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Whenever you define humans in a certain way, it leaves somebody out...I don’t want to leave people out. I’m very motivated to include people with cognitive disabilities in what it means to be human. But the idea that reason is relational means that we need education in order to practise reason. And all of us need education, that’s part of what it means to become citizens. But we also need some support in order to experience relational reason. And I think that the need for support...shouldn’t exclude people from politics. Rather, we should be motivated to provide that support. And I also think people with cognitive disabilities need to be included. So that puts the burden on us to rethink what politics is and how we can offer access to politics. So instead of saying, this is what politics is and you can’t participate, I think we need to be rethinking what politics is.
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I like to find political theory in some unusual places. I was an English and political science major in undergrad and that has definitely stuck with me. And I think that this is connected to lived experience in many cases too, as with the case of Flannery O’Connor, who lived for a number of years with lupus. Disability is common and vulnerability is ubiquitous. If you live long enough, you will experience some degree of disability. Disability is present among our families and our friends, so of course it’s present in literature. And I think fiction brings together descriptions of life, of real life, even though they’re imaginary, of concrete life. It’s asking you to think about particular contexts, particular situations, together with theory and ideas. And I think it’s that intersection that excites and energises my work. We can think about theory in practice through literature.
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I am both very optimistic about community, and I try to be a realist about community as well. So [abuse] is a kind of paternalism. I think, by calling it relational tyranny I'm trying to say that paternalism is political. So it’s not just a sort of power over somebody’s choice, but it’s a diminishment of their political agency, it’s a diminishment of their space to act. I think just as relational reason tells us that we need support, we need to invite everyone into shared decision-making, we also have its opposite. We have the tendency, or the possibility, of people seeking to close down the space for action for some people, to close down the space for deliberation, to exclude people from implementation. We have this tendency to dominate one another. It’s really the opposite...of inclusion. So not only can there be a dictator in politics, but groups can tyrannise... But what [Arendt] is saying is that criticism is an act of citizenship, it’s a political act. And so I see in some of these communities, what I find most profound is when they see the need to support people with disabilities in making critiques. I find that really profound and amazing.
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One of the reasons that I’m really interested in subsidiarity, and that is I think there's a tendency to standardise approaches to care, and I’m really interested in variety. So when I look at Geel and L’Arche and Camphill...I think what I see that’s beautiful is the way that they can evolve and develop in response to their particular context, to the particular people with disabilities that live there, to the world around them...We can try doing this in different ways, and there are certain things we want to avoid. We want to avoid abuse, but it’s okay for things to look different....I think space for that creativity and that difference is really important and something that different groups approaching this at the local level preserves....And I think I was struck in the care ethics research to see so much on subsidiarity...I think care is this thing that is concerned with other individuals. It’s very concrete. And so there’s a recognition in care ethics that making care happen at the national level loses the interactions between individuals, the particularity, the listening that is really essential to care.
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I think communities that bring us together across differences, that get us talking to each other, that get us acting together is where I have hope that we can think together, that we can then engage in political life together. I think for care, for engaged care, for relationships of care, to have social and political implications, it involves not just caring for each other, not just this action of care, but also how we reflect on that care. And I think it depends on the stories we tell ourselves about that care. And of course, there are better and worse stories that we can tell. There are better and worse stories that we can use to create an identity for ourselves, a collective identity, and we have to want to tell those solidaristic stories. But I think care, I think engagement, I think coming together is an essential step. And then reflecting on what happens is the second step.
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You can listen to the whole episode here, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can download a transcript of the episode here:
That’s all for now…
The Careful Thinking podcast is taking a break over the summer, so this episode will be the last one for a while. The podcast will return in the autumn with more cutting edge conversations about care. However, there’ll continue to be regular postings at this newsletter, so please check in here from time to time – and if you haven’t done so already, why not subscribe to receive regular updates? It’s free, and it always will be.
The header image for this post is a photograph of a community celebration at Newton Dee Camphill Community in Scotland, one of the sites that features in Lorraine Krall McCrary’s research (via the community’s Facebook page).
have a lovely summer Martin -- thank you for a great season!