None of this thinking is new. These are some of the writers, philosophers, and organizers whose work laid the ground for how we understand care, dependence, and collective survival.
A writer and cultural critic who treated love as an ethical practice rather than a passing feeling, tied directly to justice and community.
A writer and organizer who documents how disabled communities keep one another alive through networks of care.
A poet, essayist, and educator who wrote with urgency about justice, love, and mutual belonging.
A poet and scholar who draws on the traditions of radical Black mothering and the natural world to explore collective survival.
A writer and facilitator whose concept of “emergent strategy” holds that large-scale change grows from small, trusting relationships.
A philosopher who contends that dependence is an ordinary human condition rather than a failure.
A scholar, author, and abolitionist whose Women, Race & Class examined how race and class shape who performs society's caregiving.
A writer, scholar, and activist who helped define Black feminism as both a movement and an intellectual tradition.
A civil rights organizer who believed that strong movements do not require strong leaders, and who built participatory, grassroots democracy.
A philosopher and Detroit organizer whose seven decades of activism centered the idea that people transform themselves by caring for one another.
A lawyer, writer, and organizer who makes the case for mutual aid as an act of solidarity rather than charity.
An abolitionist geographer known for the principle that “where life is precious, life is precious.”
A Vietnamese Zen teacher who coined the term “interbeing” to describe how all things depend on one another.
A botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation who writes about reciprocity with the living world as a way of life.
A literary scholar whose essays transformed how kinship, gender, and Black life under slavery are understood.
A pioneering science-fiction writer whose Earthseed novels imagine communities that survive collapse by adapting and depending on one another.
A poet and essayist who argued that no one lives a single-issue life and that our struggles are therefore bound together.
A Nigerian philosopher, poet, and psychologist whose idea of “post-activism” invites people to slow down and notice how deeply entangled they already are.
A writer, editor, and filmmaker whose 1970 anthology The Black Woman helped establish Black women's writing as a field of its own.
A disability justice organizer who developed the idea of “crip ancestorship,” the wisdom and care passed between disabled people across generations.
A feminist writer and organizer who has spent decades documenting the unpaid care work that sustains society.
A writer and organizer who helped launch the international Wages for Housework campaign in the 1970s.
A sociologist who showed how race, class, and gender operate as one interlocking system, which she named the matrix of domination.
A group of Black feminists who declared, in 1977, that if Black women were free, everyone would be free.
An organizer and educator who champions community-based safety and the conviction that “hope is a discipline.”
A philosopher of education who argued that the relationship between the one caring and the one cared for is the foundation of ethics.
A therapist and author whose book My Grandmother's Hands examines how trauma, especially racialized trauma, is carried in the body and healed through it.
A disability justice writer and educator who places interdependence at the heart of her work, arguing that needing one another is a strength rather than a deficiency.
A pioneering disability rights leader whose organizing helped secure the access laws that many disabled people depend on today.
A poet whose spare, luminous verse honored the body, family, and the endurance of ordinary Black life.