How to Care More

Our contemporary moment is rife with injustices and crises: environmental disasters, climate change, racial divides, political divides, sexual misconduct, and high unemployment and debt rates, amongst other urgent challenges. While it is important to recognize these problems and call for change, we can also learn from caring initiatives that foster new ways of living, based in relationality, respect, and mutual support. How to Care More offers a definition of care based in relational action, highlighting care as an umbrella concept that can catalyze personal and social change. Each chapter provides an overview of one skill to practice caring more, including listening, consent, collaboration, and cultivating inclusion, love, and resilience that will enhance personal wellbeing and relationships with others, in our families, workplaces, and communities. With definitions of key terms and hands-on activities, How to Care More offers thought-provoking discussion and powerful examples of small-scale action and community building that can have a big impact, empowering readers to work towards positive social change.

Miranda Campbell is associate professor in the School of Creative Industries at Ryerson University in Toronto, where she teaches courses in creative collaboration, diversity, equity, inclusion, and care ethics. Her research focuses on creative employment, youth culture, and small-scale and emerging forms of cultural production. Her first book, Out of the Basement: Youth Cultural Production in Practice and in Policy, mapped the changing realities of youth self-employment in creative fields in the 21st century and was shortlisted for the Donner Prize for the best public policy book by a Canadian. Dr. Campbell’s involvement with creative communities includes coordination and participation on the board of directors with Rock Camp for Girls Montreal, a summer camp dedicated to empowerment for girls through music education, and with Whippersnapper Gallery, an artist-run center focusing on emerging artists in Toronto.