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Abstract
In this community-based, philosophical experiment in thought, I engaged Foucauldian philosophies of neoliberalism as well as posthuman and Black feminist relational ontologies to show how burnout and self-care discourses in community organizing have been co-opted by neoliberalism. I positioned the threat of neoliberal co-optation as an ontological problem and explored how relational, emergent ontologies might activate conceptual and practical possibilities for more sustainable community organizing. Specifically, I offered care for the relation as a way of caring that is accountable to our entangled becomings, and I considered the relational, emergent micro-utopic practices that some organizers already engage to show that neither neoliberalism nor Cartesian ontology is totalizing and that community organizing can be one such site for subversive ways of being. To support this philosophical inquiry, I drew on my own encounters in community organizing spaces, as well as individual and group conversations I facilitated with community organizers about how they’ve moved through stuck places in their organizing and how they imagine sustainable community organizing engagements. By bringing an ontological analysis to burnout and self-care, I showed how even some of the concepts that circulate in progressive organizing spaces are antagonistic toward the collectivist ethos to which many progressive organizing efforts subscribe. This project troubles, extends, and contributes to the activist burnout studies literature in two primary ways: (1) by positioning the concepts of burnout and self-care in neoliberal discourse, I showed how these concepts reinscribe a particular individualist subject that forecloses possibilities for thought and action, and (2) through situating this discourse within Cartesian humanism, I challenged the innocence of these concepts and invested ontology with a foundational animacy through which entire worlds and political futures can be imagined, constructed, and lived. This dissertation offers a glimmer of hope about the viability of aligning our processes and practices in progressive organizing settings with the world(s) we desire.