The Council of Care
Implementation in Education Setting at Wageningen University, February 2024. Course: Transformative and participatory qualitative research approaches and methods. Photo by Gabriela De La Rosa.
The Council of Care is a participatory, arts-based methodology developed by Gabriela De La Rosa and Adriana Ressiore during their PhDs. In this process, participants engage in a mock decision-making exercise that invites humans and non-humans to participate in the discussion. The method draws inspiration from various practical and theoretical approaches, including the Council of All Beings (Seed et al., 1988), Theater of the Oppressed (Boal, 2005), and Matters of Care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017).
The Council of Care's primary goal is to explore how to include those typically excluded from mainstream decision-making processes while making the process enjoyable, sparking creativity, and keeping care as a guide. The Council of Care aims to cultivate collaborative, ethical, socially just, and open-minded decision-making by challenging established hierarchies between humans and non-humans.
The application of the Council of Care method is a structured process that unfolds over approximately 2 hours. It involves multiple steps, including check-in, situating the participants in the case and place, interactive and reflective embodiment, the council discussion, and generative harvest and check-out. This structure makes the Council of Care adaptable and implementable with different groups of people in educational, policy, or local community settings. The methodology has been implemented ten times through these different settings.
Implementation in the community setting in Siribinha, Bahia, Brazil, March 2022. Collecting words for the care word cloud. Photo by Nina Prado.
Currently, the creators are working on an academic article to explore the challenges and potentials of the Council of Care as a tool for promoting transdisciplinary collaboration and caring decision-making. By reframing participants' perceptions of agency, this arts-based method helps us better understand, include, and transform the roles of human and non-human beings toward a more participatory and caring future.
