CARE FROM THE BEGINNING: Birthing Collective Origins, Interdependent Cities, and New Community Economies

Core tenets of community economies scholarship are to consider how human livelihoods are built around the need to care for ourselves and one another and how economic practices are configured in recognition of fundamental and shared interdependence. In this chapter we consider how a politics of care must be interwoven with the work of transforming economies for people and planet. Drawing on research into the experience and spaces of childbirth, the chapter offers a reconsideration of human beginnings as interconnected subjects. It is argued that the lessons learned here, at the first moments of new life, can provide alternative foundations for how we think about and practice economic life. This chapter explores how telling a new story about the foundations of human endeavor provides a way to shift from assumed traits of rational profit-maximizing subjectivities and to instead foreground the collective responsibility to care that originates in how we come-into-being-in-community.