"A concept that has been occupying my mind in recent years is ‘care’. It resonates particularly strongly when thinking about women’s and gender history, and the work of women, gender non-conforming, and queer people who write history. By ‘care’ I am thinking of emotion, attention, and time for others as well as physical caretaking, and how it works within social, cultural, and political networks. The pandemic brought renewed attention to how the work of care skews disproportionately along lines of gender, race, sexuality, and class in the medical sphere, but such dynamics are also well documented for other industries, especially academia. 

While continuing to reflect on how such phenomena operate in my own working world, I have been deeply influenced by scholarship that reveals networks of care in history and argues for their importance in making the world work. Among the examples that have resonated with me are the preservation of ethnic histories and the experiences of displacement by women textile artists and storytellers in Southeast Asian refugee communities, and the intersections of queer and feminist organizations for both physical caretaking and political activism during the ACT UP era in the United States. Such examples have influenced the way I approach my research on wartime displacement and community formation in mid twentieth century China and Taiwan. They have prompted me to analyze how both gender and age shaped the experience and dangers of displacement. I have also begun to think seriously about how wartime could both reinforce heteropatriarchal social and political structures and disrupt them. While the Nationalist and later the Communists took refuge in reinforcing the family-state analogy via the commemoration of wartime and revolutionary martyrs, displaced persons formed networks of work colleagues and ‘fellowships of the road’—kinds of found family—as well as hometown and military connections as a means of exercising care in a time of frequent separation within the biological family. The experiences and identities of women began to appear more frequently in lineage genealogies after the war. Gender dynamics also continue to shape the work of care as expressed in mourning, and when, where, and how that work took place. More broadly and lastingly, my experience of writing and teaching continue to be shaped by conversations with colleagues and students in History and across Brown about the ethics of care in research, and the responsibilities we hold as storytellers and after the fact companions of those we write and speak about."