Towards building caring communities: imagining alterity with mushrooms

Abstract

Oft-touted as a “successful model of state capitalism” (Völgyi, 2019, pp. 275), Singapore continuously speeds towards a future in which its government holds significant power over all dimensions of its citizen’s lives. Here, the simultaneous forces of capitalism and paternalism under the state results in a society predicated on hierarchy and subjugation, where stringent control is exercised over the private lives of its people, while civil liberties and participation in the public sphere are limited and regulated. In this dog-eat-dog environment, a false and competitive belief in scarcity takes hold, alienating people as relationships between individuals skew towards replicating systems of power, allowing indifference, suspicion and hostility to proliferate. Within such circumstances, individuals might consequently defect instead to apathy, and are incentivised to care in stunted and exclusive ways — assuming responsibility only for themselves, or their most immediate contacts.

As such, the development of Caring Communities provides opportunities to discover alternative ways of relating to others, diverging from diminutive modes of care organised around more self-centred values, towards “multiplying who we care for and how.”

Towards Building Caring Communities is a project that hopes to explore ways of inculcating care into otherwise uncaring systems and environments. Contextualised within the School of Art, Design and Media (ADM) at Nanyang Technological University Singapore (NTU), the project attempts to meaningfully identify how micro-communities counteract carelessness, based on shared values of mutuality, education and shared responsibility. The resulting publication provides an assemblage of ideas towards developing care capacities in ADM, including essays, stories, images and blueprints for change submitted by students. Instead of acting as a definitive and instructive resource on How to build Caring Communities, this publication aims to become a living document of ideas/actions/activities/initiatives, up for co-creation, negotiation and adjustment, spiralling outwards to generate further engagements towards creating a more caring and just world for all.