Care Made Visible (RBF2024)

Please check ticket info for this event below, incl. information about access.

What is it to be responsible for someone’s care in a society where individualism is rewarded? What kinds of care are obscured in the public sphere?

To usher in the weekend, we invite you to an essential conversation about one of the most fundamental building blocks of society, and one which is more often than not, pushed into the private world: the act of caring.

Writer Marianne Brooker and art therapist Richa Okhandiar-MacDougall speak to Emily Kenway about how views toward care have changed over time and how we could collectively step up to deliver better networks of support and changes in government policy.

Our speakers:

Richa OkhDougall is an art therapist working with survivors of sexual harm within an intersectional feminist and anti-racist framework. They are a queer anti-oppressive practitioner and community artist whose work considers themes of intergenerational pain, colonialism/neocolonialism and collective forms of care. They are interested in exploring how communal connections outside of individual mental health practice can imagine new forms of support to bodies, land and liberation. Their work considers how creating with joy, community and love can impact our ties to each other and foster change.

Marianne Brooker is a writer and campaigner based in Bristol. Her first book, Intervals, describes living with her mother as she hastened her death. Blending personal and social history, Intervals explores questions of choice, care and creativity under austerity. It won the 2022 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize and was longlisted for the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction this year. Marianne’s writing has also been published in Vittles, the Observer and Lit Hub. She’s currently working on a novel.

Our chair:

Emily Kenway is a former carer, and is the author of Who Cares: the Hidden Crisis of Caregiving and How We Solve It (Hachette, 2023) which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. Emily has written about care for a range of publications including the Washington Post, Guardian, Independent and more. She is currently completing a PhD at the University of Edinburgh, holding a coaching space for people trying to set up peer support care circles, and running a research project on unpaid care for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

*Please note that masks will be required at this event (as with all Lighthouse events).

*Accessibility: All events will be professionally filmed & livestreamed. The Roxy is wheelchair accessible (including toilets) and we'll have provisions for neurodivergent guests including stims, quiet space and colour-coded lanyards.

*Events are £6 or free -we completely understand paying for one or two events and then getting free spots for others. The Radical Book Fair is entirely bookshop run and ticket sales are vital to keeping the fair sustainable and paying all our speakers so all support is heartily welcome!

*Featured books: The book & ticket option will select the most recently published book at any given event, if you’re not sure which book you want or don’t want that featured book, then buy a £6 voucher ticket that can be used for any of the books below.

*If you'd like to help make the book fair accessible to more folks, please consider adding to our pay-it-forward fund HERE.