Free universities and radical reading groups: learning to care in the here and now

This article is an autoethnography of two free education projects, Brisbane Free University and Queering Health Hobart. We suggest that in theorizing our experiences of these sites through feminist theories of care, we see how counter-capitalist and anti-oppressive cultures might be fostered within and against neoliberal capitalism. In particular, we suggest that these spaces foster forms of relationality, locatedness and attentiveness which disrupt the (re)production of neoliberal logics. By attending to one another in the specific conditions of the ‘here and now’, we begin to prefigure counter-capitalist cultures of care.