Collective care investigates how communities in Puerto Rico respond to recent disasters, from hurricanes Irma and María in 2017 to the 2020 earthquakes and the COVID-19 pandemic. In collaboration with communities and their organizations, we develop collections, educational resources, and storytelling projects that explore how to survive the collision of climate change, the debt crisis and colonialism.
The Hurricane María Archive is Collective Care’s digital collection. It brings together oral histories, photographs, videos, documents, art, and other documents related to community responses to disasters, from 2017 to 2022.
Collective Care explores how communities respond to recent disasters in Puerto Rico. Through this project, researchers, students, community members and their organizations preserve these histories in collections housed at the University of Puerto Rico at Cayey, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, and in community spaces. They also develop educational resources, publications and storytelling projects that highlight how communities use local knowledge and strategies to respond to disasters in the margins of the state.
A project ascribed to the Institute of Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Puerto Rico at Cayey, Collective Care develops innovative models of collaboration and participation to research the emergencies of climate change and the debt crisis in a colonial context. Collective Care has received generous support from the Puerto Rico Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian Latino Center, and the American Council of Learned Societies.
Contact: Rosa Ficek Torres, Directora del proyecto, rosa.ficek@upr.edu