Theatre-making in careless times: arts-based approaches to care in Mombasa, Kenya

“No one cares about us – we know our lives are disposable.” This observation was shared with the PI by Fatima, a young woman from Mombasa, following a participatory theatre performance about Covid vaccine rumours. Voicing sentiments with global resonance, Fatima’s commentary highlights the profound dearth of care that underpins her reason for refusing vaccination, and that many Mombasans feel in relation to institutional structures at all levels – a lack of care colours engagements with the state, health institutions and development initiatives. Fatima’s words demonstrate how the giving and receiving of care is racialized, classed and gendered (Mahon & Robinson 2011), and evoke the wide-ranging implications that ‘care deficits’ (Hochschild 2003) can have on health, worth and wellbeing. We live in a world where ‘carelessness reigns’ (Chatzidakis et al. 2020).Care is central to what it means to be human (Heidegger 1967; Tronto1993), and yet is systematically undervalued – neoliberal and patriarchal conceptions of autonomy have failed to account for the mutual interdependencies on which everyone of us depends (Butler 2020). Giving and receiving care is recognized as ambiguous and unpredictable – care is bound up with experiences of dependence, duty and disempowerment as much as connection and interdependence (Cook & Trundle 2020). However, efforts to map and understand care to date have taken insufficient account of the extent to which care intersects with social processes such as surveillance, profit maximization and violent (post)colonial state-building (Charles 2020). These enduring legacies leave many with well-founded suspicions about supposedly benevolent ‘caring technologies’, such as vaccination, as well as towards broader health and social care services provided by state, medical and aid regimes. This project proposes a novel methodology to unpack questions of power, inequality and ambivalence in relation to care in Mombasa. Drawing inspiration from recent interventions on care in applied theatre (Stuart Fisher & Thompson 2020; Mayo 2021) and anthropology (Mol 2008; Cook & Trundle 2020), this project will combine arts-based methods with ethnography to: map understandings and experiences of the presence, absence and ambivalences of care amongst young adults in Mombasa (18–35-year-olds) develop community-led recommendations and practices that support more equitable access to care for all leverage artistic outputs to engage a broad range of actors involved in health and social care provision in Mombasa (including policymakers, community organizers and donors). The project takes forward findings from two previous collaborations between the PI and Jukwaa Arts Productions, a Mombasan creative arts company that specializes in participatory theatre for social change. As Project Partner and Subcontractor, Jukwaa will work with PI to develop an innovative, arts-based methodology for conducting research on care, grounded in a series of workshops with young adults. These workshops will form the basis from which we create two participatory theatre performances, a short film and roundtables in Mombasa, each designed to provoke public debate and policy change around care. An accompanying methodological toolkit will showcase the production and performance process in Mombasa, while outlining arts-based approaches for researching and building more equitable access to care elsewhere.