Practicing Care: Against Organized Abandonment in Raleigh-Durham

Abstract

This thesis examines how formal and informal networks of care persist in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, within contemporary conditions of racialized disinvestment, university expansion, and technological concentration. It begins with what the Care Collective describes as the crisis of care, which emerges through what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls organized abandonment: the uneven withdrawal of resources, infrastructures, and institutional support from communities. As infrastructures meant to support life are unevenly withdrawn, communities are left to absorb the work of care themselves. The crisis is not that care disappears, but that it persists under constraint—becoming both vital and insufficient. Drawing on ethnographic engagement, interviews, and lived participation, this project documents emergent care infrastructures—including community fridges, mutual aid networks, community schools, and student organizing—as they take shape in real time. I demonstrate how care is not a coherent alternative system, but an ongoing, imperfect practice shaped by constraint, contradiction, and collective resistance. The argument unfolds in three parts:

Part One: Utopia Under Constraints argues that the promise of care lies in its capacity to imagine more just worlds, even as these ideals are negotiated within uncaring infrastructures. Part Two: Technology and The Limits of Connection shows how institutional and technological systems reproduce disconnection, limiting care while claiming to enable it. Part Three: Practicing Solidarity Under Risk contends that care requires an ongoing practice of solidarity—one that embraces risk, discomfort, and contradiction rather than avoiding them.