The Carework Project - by Jennifer Case (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"Care work is climate work." Jennifer Case first encountered this message during the pandemic, while monitoring her daughter's attempts at virtual learning and trying to keep her toddler from running naked into faculty Zoom meetings. The phrase appeared online beside photos of backyard gardens and essential workers in masks, offering an unexpected validation: caring for others--whether children, the ill, or the earth--is vital work. Intrigued, Case began exploring the connections between personal, domestic, and ecological care. What started as research through the lenses of feminism and economics grew into a larger investigation that touched on environmental thought, Indigenous teachings, disability studies, and the psychology of empathy. Along the way, Case developed a broader spiritual and ecological awareness that changed how she viewed the act of caring itself.

Part memoir and part cultural reflection, The Carework Project combines intimate storytelling with research, interviews, and visual art to explore what care means in a time of climate crisis. Case shows how caregiving, often invisible, gendered, or undervalued, is central to our survival. She examines how trauma and burnout affect our ability to connect, and how healing can start with the smallest gestures of attention. The book invites readers to envision a world where care is not a burden but a source of mutual renewal and belonging.

Visually striking collage postcards enhance the text. The result is a hybrid work that feels both timely and timeless, honoring the messy, creative, and transformative act of caring for one another and the living world.

About the Author

Jennifer Case teaches creative writing at the University of Central Arkansas. She also serves as an assistant nonfiction editor at Terrain.org and is the supervising editor of Arkana. She is the author of The Carework Project: Reckoning with Love, Labor, and the Living World, We Are Animals: On the Nature and Politics of Motherhood and Sawbill: A Search for Place, and her work has appeared in Orion, the Sycamore Review, and Fourth River. She lives in central Arkansas.