3.1
INTRODUCTION
Conceptual Framework: Living Heritage & the Connection to Care all-encompassing response to specific individual and collective needs. It’s this action that maintains the order and sustains the connections between people and planet through a sequence that reflects the identity of the people, the spaces they occupy, and the exchanges that take place within a city.
To deconstruct living heritage through the dimension of solidarity and systems of care, we started by recognising the critical needs of the African-Caribbean community in Sheffield and the supportive role provided by the Sheffield and District African Caribbean Community Association (SADACCA) to retain the community’s connection to the diasporic space.
Power and Mee (2020) define infrastructures of care as “the infrastructural forms that pattern the organization of care within society, the more or less embedded tracks on which care may run, shaping and being shaped by actors along the way.” It is important to highlight that care is a continuous process. It’s this process that capitalises on the cultural and social capital of our collective interdependence and responsibility to contribute towards the maintenance and repair of social and spatial fabric, but also individual reparative healing. Possessing this understanding, we attempted to highlight SADACCA as an anchor for Sheffield’s diasporic communities, particularly the African-Caribbean community, and the customs carried out to legitimize a sense of belonging and establish the identity of communities through food as an infrastructure of care.
This frame of thought explains that although the practice of care may have been fragmented over time through population migration - forced and otherwise - the concept of living heritage emphasises the capability of communities to anchor traditional cultural practices and leverage new experiences to maintain “[the] affective connective tissue between an inner self and an outer world” (Hobart & Kneese: 2020:2). In this case, reviewing the key survival practices and geopolitics that influences the bodies of African-Caribbeans and the spaces they navigate as individuals, social groups and political organisations across Sheffield. Collective life as a social phenomenon is established on the premise that people belong to groups of similarly conscious beliefs, ideas, histories, and socialisations that encourage relationships which allow society to function and develop. It emphasises the concept of togetherness and continuous sustenance through care giving and care receiving. Through this concept, care becomes an
Fig 2.
Food, as we soon found out, can be a foundation for fostering bonds and maintaining heritage in a diaspora community.
Theoretical framework of living heritage and infrastructure of care. (Source: Authors)
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