Caring for the self and others: a reflection on everyday commoning amid the COVID-19 pandemic
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REFLECTIVE ESSAY
Caring for the self and others: a reflection on everyday commoning amid the COVID‑19 pandemic Chun Zheng1 Received: 11 July 2020 / Accepted: 13 August 2020 © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020
Abstract In this essay, I share my experiences and reflection on fighting the COVID-19 pandemic from the perspective of a Chinese student residing in Pittsburgh, USA. Three examples of “commoning”—acts of managing shared resources by a group of people—reveal the importance of care and collaboration in the time of uncertainty. First, when COVID-19 posed a threat to the food supply chain, community gardens and home gardening ensured food security and enhanced mutual support. Second, the emergence of online activities of teaching, learning, and collaborating presented an opportunity of having more collective, equitable, and diverse formats of virtual communities. Lastly, volunteering in the distribution of “Healthy Packs,” I witnessed the nurture of a sense of belonging and a connection with home in the student community. These examples suggest that facing the crisis, care-driven commoning activities at the individual, everyday level lay the foundation for large-scale collaborative systems. Keywords COVID-19 · Everyday commoning · Care · Pittsburgh · Food supply chain · Online sharing · Healthy packs
1 Commoning in a crisis
2 From one epicenter to another
The COVID-19 pandemic is sweeping the planet. We, as individuals in the extended human family, are living through a crisis together. Within the vast and daunting global crisis are changes to every person’s daily life. These changes reveal the normally hidden human needs of care and collaboration and force us to re-invest in ourselves and our communities. In this essay, I share my personal experiences since the beginning of the pandemic and my observations of carebased everyday commoning activities over this period from the perspective of a Chinese student residing in Pittsburgh, USA (Fig. 1). Commoning, as defined by Gibson-Graham et al. (2013), takes place when a group of people is motivated by an ethic of care for a flourishing and sustainable common future and decides to manage shared resources in a collective manner. After discussing three examples of everyday commoning: gardening as commoning, online sharing as commoning, and volunteering as commoning, I reflect on the potential of expanding the sentiment of care for ourselves and others into larger-scale collaborative networks.
January 23rd, the day before the Chinese Lunar New Year’s Eve, the news that Wuhan and three other surrounding cities were going into lockdown1 struck all TV channels in China. While words of the spread of a new type of pneumonia had been circulating for days (Wee and Wang 2020), Wuhan’s lockdown marked the start of an unprecedented national struggle and later, a global crisis. Although physically stranded overseas, I could hear the worry in my family and friends’ voices over the phone. The anticipated joy of the annual family reunion was completely overwhelmed. In th
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