Atlas of Care

Community Guidelines

Atlas of Care — community and principles

Welcome to the Atlas of Care. Whether you come heartbroken from other platforms (a diaspora from oppressive features or an exploratory quest for something different) or you have emerged from the offline world looking for a comfortable piece of bits and bytes to rest, you are in the right place.

This computational platform exists to host testimonies of care from all around the globe, in English or in any other language. The community it fosters is not built from likeness, but from a shared gravitation around care: caring about, taking care of, caregiving, and receiving care. As scholar Joan Tronto has argued, care has been historically relegated to the domestic, the emotional, and the feminine. A conditioning that has left little room for caregiving to be recognized as a force of social reproduction. This Atlas exists to make that recognition possible.

Rest assured that what you have found is fed only by testimonies of care built from ambivalence, relationality, and slow labor. These are our four founding principles, drawn from Lauren Berlant's theory of living mediation and the feminist server network's call for infrastructures that solidify without calcifying:

Care: every testimony is an act of witnessing care, given or received. This is the archive's subject and its method simultaneously.

Ambivalence: we do not ask you to resolve, conclude, or optimise your experience of care. Contradictions are welcome here. The platform is designed to hold irresolution: not everything needs to be seen from close up, and not everything needs to end.

Relationality: this community is held together not because we are alike, but because care connects us across difference. Every language, every coordinate on Earth, every form care takes is part of this commons.

Slow labor: this archive moves at the pace of human attention. There is one moderator, finite storage, no algorithmic moderation, and a 7-day response window. Slowness is a political choice.

How to explore. Please feel free to explore this platform as you wish. You can click on the different pins on the spinning globe to read testimonies of care. You can also read the poem that crosses the globe, as long as your cursor is far from the centre of the screen. The poem can only be read when we distance ourselves from a centre that represents the hegemonic order, that which does not recognise the political value of care as a form of social reproduction.

The poem is built from the testimonies this community has shared, by extracting every octosyllable contained in them. The octosyllable is the metrical foundation of the corrido, a Latin American form of collective memory and resistance, so don't be surprised if you find a rhythm while you read. Don't be surprised either if you find verses in different languages. Every language is welcome here. Care is a language itself.

How to contribute. You can submit your own testimony by clicking the submit button at the bottom left. You will be asked for coordinates (to pin your testimony to the globe. Feel free to choose any place that feels right), the language of your testimony, and the testimony itself. A minimum of 20 words and a maximum of 250. These limits exist to foster octosyllables, keep the database manageable, and protect the moderation team. Every boundary here is an act of care for the archive.

Moderation. Every testimony is reviewed by a human moderator before publication. Following Nicki Gaskins' framework of Technovernacular Creativity, this platform is built on the conviction that historically marginalised communities are not merely consumers of technology but producers of knowledge. Moderation checks that the testimony speaks from personal experience of care; does not identify third parties without consent; and is consistent with the principles of care, ambivalence, relationality, and slow labor. What will not be published: content that targets, harasses, or identifies individuals; content that uses the language of care to cause harm; bot-generated content; extreme speech or misinformation in any form.

Suggestions about the platform are genuinely welcome. This Atlas is designed to be responsive, not prescriptive. In the spirit of Michael Murtaugh's call for soft filters rather than templates.

Take care.