Sabr is a Care Collaborative.
How can we re-think, politically engage and collectively organize care for the people in contemporary societies?
This question drives our collaborative’s efforts to create a shared platform for rights and justice in care provision.
Uninhibited privatisation coupled with withdrawal of state support for essential public infrastructures have created multiple crises of care. This care crisis falls disproportionately on precarious lives, along vectors of race, caste, gender, class, and religion. The People have also organized in response, nourishing and sustaining human and non-human care relations in this world.’
In this context, and anchored in India, Sabr’s aims are as follows:
- To initiate public discussions on how to organise care for the people.
- To connect students, academics, community organizers, activists, practitioners, and policy-makers.
- To develop inter-disciplinary research conversations.
- To break silos in policy and academic discourse.
- To imagine a more caring and care-ful world
Sabr currently focuses on:
- People’s healthcare
- Elder care practices
- Paid and unpaid domestic care work
Sabr means patience in Urdu, Hindustani, Persian, and Arabic. People enact Sabr daily to endure the everyday violence that permeates the social order. A manifesto for change in a war-struck, debris-filled world calls for a politics of patience, a politcs of Sabr.
Sabr started work in December 2023 and was launched as a digital public platform in November 2024.
Core members
Aiman Nida
Aiman is a PhD student specializing in Human Resource Management at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. Her research focuses on women domestic workers, delving into themes of precarity, social positionality, and inequality.
Devi Vijay
Devi is a Professor at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. Her research focuses on inequality, institutions, and collective action, with a focus on healthcare. To know more about her work, click here.
Sayendri Panchadhyayi
Sayendri is an Assistant Professor & Program Head of Sociology in the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences at RV University, Bangalore. She has interests in sociology of care and life course, medical anthropology, critical gerontology, feminist STS, and death and bereavement. To know more about her work, check here.
Shaima C
Shaima is currently pursuing her doctorate at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta. Her research critically examines the political economy of health and healthcare, exploring how it shapes the accessibility and affordability of healthcare services, as well as resource utilization across various healthcare organizational settings.
Shalini Gupta
Shalini is a doctoral student at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. Her research critically examines the organization of craft in the contemporary, with a focus on the spaces and practices of craft. Her research interests are in areas of craft, alternative forms of organizing, inequalities and institutions, and intersects with management studies and sociology.
Sabr: A care collaborative 