Pirate Care

Growing out of years of collective struggle and study within Pirate Care – a transnational collectivity of practitioners, researchers and activists who have, since 2019, conspired to develop common structures of social reproduction – Valeria Graziano and Tomislav Medak will present their 2025 book Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity (written together with Marcell Mars). Their work illuminates stories and techniques of stealthy rebellions and acts of solidarity deemed illegal: activists organizing to rescue people on the move, communities creating access to forbidden medicines, networks liberating knowledge from the hands of power, and many more. Echoing the golden age of pirates who dared to defy empires at its dawn, Pirate Care and its collective study syllabus (https://syllabus.pirate.care/), offer a repertoire of life-sustaining practices that breathe courage and defiance against fascism and imperialism on the horizon. Against atomized despair, Pirate Care shows that fighting back isn’t only about legal and legislative changes but also about organizing, direct action, and disobedient care. Valeria and Tomislav’s lecture will be followed by a conversation with the audience. • Valeria Graziano moves between research, cultural practice, and political organising focusing on care justice. Her research, rooted in feminist and autonomist Marxism, attends to the refusal of work and the political uses of pleasure as tactics through which collectives sustain themselves amid the authoritarian drift of the present. She works at the University of Rijeka. • Tomislav Medak is a researcher with a PhD in technopolitics and planetary environmental crisis whose research focuses on care, ecology, technology, capitalist development, disability, and the commons. Formerly, a member of the theory and publishing team of the Multimedia Institute/MAMA in Zagreb and an artist in the performing arts collective BADco, he is politically active as a policy coordinator for the green-left party political platform Možemo! in Croatia.