How do we organise care when care is criminalised?

This September, we’re inviting friends, accomplices, and fellow travellers to Berlin for four days of conversation, practical work, and collective reflection on the politics and tactics of pirate care, a term that names how care continues to be organised outside legality, against austerity, and in spite of repression.

Decades of neoliberal policy, racialised border regimes, and extractive governance have dismantled the infrastructures of collective life. In the passage from welfare to warfare capitalism, access to care is rendered once more either a privatized commodity, a tool for discipline, or a crime.

And yet, mutual aid kitchens appear. Clinics emerge in squats. People cross checkpoints. Medics strike.We find each other in makeshift care rooms that shouldn’t exist, at borders that shouldn’t be there, in shadow archives where forbidden knowledges circulate in moments where grief turns into organising.

This September, we gather in Berlin to tend to this work. To name it, share it, test it, stretch it.

The gathering is hosted between two collectively held spaces: AGIT (https://aaagit.org/), a movement and project space for organising and political education, and the Casino for Social Medicine (https://www.casinoooo.org/), a cafe, bar and social clinic. Both spaces are grounded in local struggles, and the gathering emerges in collaboration with them.

What we’ll explore

The encounter will centre on four thematic threads. These are not rigid tracks, but starting points for shared inquiry:

✹ Criminalisation of Solidarity ✹ In more and more places, when care takes the form of solidarity with migrants, trans lives, reproductive autonomy, racial and decolonial struggles, including solidarity with Palestine and resistance to genocide, or refusals of war and ecocide, it becomes punished. Surveillance, sanction, repression and criminalisation are not accidents but symptoms of a broader strategy to fracture what binds us. What practices are emerging in response to this? How are people building counter-infrastructures, defending each other, or simply persisting together? How do we collectively refuse the criminalisation of care, not in theory, but in situated acts of protection, repair, and defiance?

✹ Healthcare Resistance ✹ Across hospitals, clinics, prisons, camps and border zones, healthcare is being shaped by logics of control, triage and abandonment. Many of us encounter care only when it is already collapsing, rationed, or turned against us. Clinical systems increasingly serve to manage populations rather than support health. And yet, other practices are emerging: self-organised clinics, care collectives, politicised networks of mutual aid, and acts of refusal within formal institutions. What does it mean to practice healthcare as resistance, not just to violence, but to isolation, burnout, and the slow grind of survival? What tools, techniques, and knowledges - whether medical, ancestral, experimental, or collective - might we already have, and how can we put them to use in the service of refusal and repair?

✹ Mutiny ✹ Mutiny names the subtle and not-so-subtle ways we can withdraw consent from toxic roles, exploitative scripts, addictive patterns, and ways of relating that do harm. It gestures toward micropolitics: quitting together, unlearning attachments to control, disinvesting from what exhausts us and our lifeworlds. Mutiny opens the possibility of queering relations, of refiguring care as something co-constituted. It asks how we might desert inherited dependencies on family, state, consumption, services, hierarchial roles, technologies, and instead begin to institute new practices of kinning, support, and intimacy.

✹ Federation ✹ Federation invites us to think about scale: how we coordinate without centralising, stay autonomous while interdependent, and sustain relationships across time and place in ways that matter politically. We want to reflect on how care practices - both past and present - have managed to share responsibility and accountability across different contexts without flattening their differences. How do we build infrastructures that can hold us not just in moments of convergence, but through the long, uneven arcs of organising? What emerging forms of connection and solidarity make us more relevant to one another’s survival?

Together, we want to examine these questions not as abstract issues, but as situations we are already navigating in our organising, caregiving, and living.

What to expect

The gathering will be held in English, and most sessions will be held in person across both venues. We’ll spend four days together sharing practices, stories, tactics, and tools. Some sessions will be pre-organised. Others will be emergent or decided on the spot. There will be open moments to rest, dream, conspire, and make sense of things together.

A detailed programme will be published closer to the date, including contributions from local and international co-conspirators. This gathering is for all of us who are already “doing the work,” or who want to be part of a shared political and practical inquiry into care, refusal, and alliance under conditions of crisis. We’re looking forward to being in the room with you.

For any questions: info@pirate.care

Contribute a proposal

This open call is directed toward practitioners of pirate care, those who are already involved in self-organised forms of caregiving, health work, solidarity infrastructure, radical education, housing justice, border struggle, or similar.

We’re looking for contributions rooted in lived experience, from any geography or context.

You might propose:

...a practical workshop... ...a story or provocation... ...a collective study or mapping session... ...a space for reflection, grief, or planning... ...an experimental format that doesn’t fit the list...

We welcome collaborations and group submissions. Some proposals may be combined with others to support flow and accessibility. A few slots will remain open until the gathering itself for emergent offerings.

Submit your idea by 24th August 2025 via this short form: https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/7DUHf+loOivEP9gUwjXXonayuWTg0ZkqKhYeRJws+hw/

We’ll get back to you by 28th August.

Logistics & accessibility

Participation is free. Please register here so we can arrange hospitality: https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/4rDjz3Qb4R+ys0jjsWHE6ZJcd3qbHKs1SC4EiNHcXkc/

Travel costs can be reimboursed for up to 12 people coming from outside Berlin, through a COST Action grant Toolkit of Care (https://toolkitof.care/).

Unfortunately, we cannot provide accommodation or food, these are self-organised.

We strive to make this space welcoming and generative. If you have specific access needs, feel free to indicate them in your submission or reach out directly.