Dean Sarah Banet-Weiser talks to Annenberg Professors Desmond Upton Patton and Julia Ticona about centering joy and care within institutions, building communities of compassion and trust, creating a joy plan, and how researchers, social workers, and even social media users should think about these terms.

Hi, and welcome to Annenberg Conversations. My name is Sarah Banet-Weiser. I am the dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, and I am the host of this Annenberg-themed podcast. In this podcast, we explore groundbreaking and imaginative research on media and communication.

We are today going to dive into the themes of care and joy. Themes that are both deeply personal and profoundly structural. Care and joy are often thought of as an intimate and individual experience, but they also exist within institutions, policies, and infrastructures.

To help unpack these questions, as well as, I'm sure, generate new ones, I am joined by my two brilliant and unbelievable colleagues who bring unique perspectives to the conversation.

We are so, so lucky to have Julia Ticona, assistant professor at Annenberg, whose research examines the intersection of technology, labor, and inequality, and Desmond Patton, a Penn Integrates Knowledge professor who explores the relationship between social media, violence prevention, and digital expression.

So I think I'll start with what is probably a bit of a difficult question, and that is, what does a caring institution look like?

Desmond, do you want to start?

Yeah, sure.

So I'm a social worker, so I, I, you know, I think about these things all the time. And I think for me, a caring institution is one that really centers humanity, well-being and trust, and its structures, and its policies, and its everyday interactions, right? And I think it really has to prioritize psychological safety and active listening and a genuine investment in people's growth and healing.

I think by embedding care into policy, right? Making well-being a performance metric for our staff or shifting power to community members, I think, is an important next step as well. But I think it really requires us to take some clear cultural shifts where care is seen as a collective responsibility rather than an individual burden.

In thinking about this issue of, like, caring institutions, my, of course, my, like, critical scholar's snotty first response is like, what if I don't want my institution to care about me?

Like, I don't want you looking over my shoulder at what I'm doing. Um, leave me alone. But, of course, that is an impulse that one needs to overcome in order to actually institution build in a way that creates the kind of institutions that you actually do want, um, looking over one's shoulder, either in a protective way or in a way that will actually foster one's development rather than getting in the way of one's intellectual curiosity or development.

And I was thinking about this in the context of political theorist Joan Tronto, who's, like, this wonderful theorist of care who, I remember reading her work for the first time, and she has this quote where she says, like, you know, care doesn't necessarily need to be democratic or egalitarian.

In fact, it's almost necessarily not that, right? When we think about caring relationships between more powerful entities and less powerful entities. But the really cool thing about her work, and in that book in particular, is that she goes on to say, like, but how could we make it that? Right? How could we actually imagine care, in a democratic context, in a more egalitarian context? And what kind of conditions need to be in place in order for that to happen?

And I found that immensely inspiring, um, as a scholar of, a critical kind of scholar of care, um, and of institutions.

I've often thought that if we allowed for more social space for the kinds of, things that we do in our everyday lives, whether that's, a partner or a child or a pet or that, if we allow for that social space, we will end up being a much more caring space because it's not about siloing off a professional life from the rest of our lives.

But because I think we're so used to burrowing in and doing our individual work, that if that space has opened up a little bit, we get a little defensive. You know, we're like, what is this about? You know, do you really care about me?

What's your ulterior motive? And I think that we really need to work towards a space and a community where we don't question when someone's like, I care about you. And it's not for some kind of personal gain. It's just because we value care.

Yeah, I think what I hear you saying is that at the core of care is the foundation of trust.

And that, that care is also relational, and so we have to be active and thoughtful around how we build that trust because then it allows us to provide care in a way that can be received.

Yeah. Yeah.

I think both of those things. I think care is absolutely relational, and it is absolutely about building trust, and building trust is hard. It requires intentionality. It requires you stepping outside of yourself. It requires you actually thinking about a broader world than the one that you occupy or inhabit.

And so it's hard to do that. And sometimes I can't do it. Sometimes I need to be in that space. But I think that that's also what coalition is about, is moving out of those spaces and feeling the freedom to do so.

One of the things that I do think is so special about Annenberg is that so much of our research involves care at its core, right? That it is about caring for others. But how do you translate that care into research?

Or how do things that often hinder us in our lives, like, you know, gender stereotypes or systemic racism or class? How do those things shape the way in which care is given and received and valued? And I know, Desmond, that you've actually worked very intentionally on this in your research and in your teaching.

Yeah, I really love this question, and I think it's actually a really hard question. Because I think we oftentimes take for granted our ability to translate work into care.

I'm a social worker, and so I am bound by a code of ethics that requires me to honor the dignity and worth of every human being. It's not an option. And so that is helpful. And it's not enough, um, because so much of the academic enterprise doesn't necessarily mean that care is going to be the thing that gets you tenure or gets you that next grant.

And so we have to be so intentional about bringing care into the work. I think it's participatory, and then, you know, it's also reflexive. And I spend a lot of time working with tech companies in, uh, talking to their AI engineers and their product managers about the need to be reflexive because I think reflexivity forces you to ask questions about who's not a part of this conversation, whose lived experiences or lived expertise are missing from the conversation.

I was trained at the University of Chicago to, you know, rigorously look for problems. But I was not trained to do that with care and to understand how care can be an imperative in the production of knowledge, especially when working with communities that you are either a part of or not a part of as well.

I think that race, gender, and class really shape what care means profoundly. Who gets care and who is deemed worthy of it? And sadly, those things are hyper racialized. And so I think we have to be thoughtful and mindful of what's missing from those conversations.

I think true care has to be relational and mutual, and it's not transactional. And that line, that it's not transactional, I think is something we need to unpack and underscore particularly within the research paradigm.

Mhmm. That actually makes me think a lot about when I saw this question, a story that came into my mind about when care became really important in my research, as like a lived commitment.

And not taking for granted necessarily, what my understanding of care was, without really being curious about what it meant for my interviewees. So, I'm, I'm white. I'm a white lady, um, for those who don't know me and who can't see me on the radio. But, uh, in the work that I do, I interview domestic workers and child care workers, nannies, who in the United States are predominantly women of color, and I did some of this work in Atlanta, Georgia.

And I came into contact with this woman who I've interviewed several times now, who her pseudonym is Karen. I'm going to call her Karen. And she's a seasoned nanny, she's worked for only three or four families, and she's worked for forty years. So that tells you what kind of a nanny she is, right?

She is with these families until those kids go to college, because she's that good. And I obviously deeply wanted to interview this person, um, and when I met her at an event, she interviewed me. She wanted to know exactly who I was speaking to. She wanted to know, not my other interviewees, but who my audiences were, what my goals were for this research, how I was going to portray her and the other members of her community that I was asking to be a part of my study.

And in my paradigm, where I was socialized into how to be a good social scientist, how to be a good sociologist, what care for interviewees meant was privacy. It meant protecting people's identities, making sure their reputations would not be associated with the study, that no identifying information would be in the interview, or that I would protect that, like, with my life, with my last dying breath.

And so that's what I told her. I was telling her all about the privacy implications. I was the sole researcher, password protected. I use all the IRB language, right, which is this institution that we have to go through to kind of check the bureaucratic box about like, yes, we are following all the rules to make sure that our research is safe and ethical.

And she was not satisfied with that answer. Um, she, uh, very calmly explained to me, very kindly explained to me, like I was one of her charges, that I had completely misunderstood what she was saying. And what she wanted to know was to make sure that her spending all this time on me was not going to go nowhere, and was not actually going to ever leave the Academy.

And she wanted to know my plan for getting her story out there. And making sure that it was heard. So, basically the opposite of what I was saying. I was here assuring her that nobody would ever know that she participated and that her secrets were all safe with me.

And she wanted to hear about how I was accountable to her and to her community and the time that that community was investing in me to actually making sure that their stories were heard by people who could change the situation, um, and what values I had as a researcher and making sure that that was going to happen.

And before we had that kind of exchange, my understanding of what care and research looked like was very wrong, um, for this community. And so just getting curious about, like, what does care look like for you interviewees, um, or you, community that I'm seeking to work with, because we assume so much, and coming from where we come from as we all do, right? it's inevitable part of the research process, but making sure to bake that conversation in to say, like, okay, are we on the same page about how I can make you feel cared for? And like, I'm worth teaching with your expertise, right? Like, I'm worth investing some of your precious time in these folks who work for hourly wages.

It's something that's really important. And so that was just a really kind of transformative experience to me. And this is a research project about care, right? So, like, I should have known, really. So, that was a really important experience, and just made me realize that, like, care has to be baked in from the very beginning conversations with interviewees, or with research participants.

Yeah, that's an amazing story and it also, I think, really, for me anyway, it really resonates with what you said, about how care is not transactional.

And so, so I was thinking, Desmond, that you have just built this so intentionally into your work and into your teaching. And one of the things when we were talking about this is that you had mentioned this mechanism of a joy plan and I love this idea and I also think that it's really a way to think about, that transactional transformational dichotomy.

How do we make a joy plan that is about transformation instead of what we can get out of it? And so maybe you could talk a little bit about that.

Yeah, for sure. I just, I want to follow up on Julia's point because I think one of the things that I think is important for us to underscore is that the aha moment that Julia had for me is a moment of inducing rigor into our work, right?

And I think that it makes us better researchers. It makes us more ethical.

And it highlights a complicated process. It complicated your work in ways that you were unexpecting, but was so enlightening. And I hope that you get to write and talk about those moments because I think as researchers we could all learn from how to do that better.

Um, and I think, how it connects to me is that I think coming to conversations and teaching about joy, have been directly related to the mistakes that I've made in my research. I study young black folks on social media platforms. And I was so focused on finding aggression and finding violence that I missed the joyful content that young people would pass to each other to calm themselves down.

And so they were already using joy as an intervention for violence on social media platforms. And so finally, I was able to get to a point where I had some clarity around the importance of joy. And so, um, the first thing that I did was I decided to start teaching about it. I'm not a scholar of joy.

I'm, I'm, I'm becoming one. But I was not trained to be a scholar of joy. And that has been this amazing door opener for me to think about the power and the importance of joy, not just as a concept, but as an action, as a verb. And that has just been a really enlightening, fun aspect of my work. And so in this class that I teach here at Annenberg called The Journey to Joy, one of the things that we do, this is a very much like a theory, practice, course.

We go back and forth between science and practice, science and practice. One of the things that I had my students do was to use kind of a user research approach to designing a joyful life. What does it look like? Who's there? What are you doing? Is it practical or is it aspirational?

And how do you protect it, right?

And so we got out big pieces of cardboard paper with big markers of all colors and we put on some really smooth music and we developed a joy plan. And this really came out of the science around joy because joy is that thing. I think we all are probably in this moment where we could either use more joy, we need more joy, or we want to find joy.

And the science says that by intentionally looking for joy and experiencing joy, it really helps us physiologically. And so I want to talk about the joy plan because I think this could be helpful for folks listening. So a joy plan is an intentional practice, right? It's an intentional practice of sustaining joy, even in difficult times and chaotic times, which we're experiencing now.

And it's really about making daily choices that nourish your spirit, deepen your connections and protect your peace.

And so these are four criteria, if you will, for creating a joy plan. Number one, identify what brings you joy. And this means you have to get real and vulnerable and honest about who you are, what you need, and kind of the life that you want to have. And so that might, include music or movement or rest or connection or creativity, whatever it might be.

Second, is that you have to make it a part of your routine. This can't just be something that you forget. You have to include it in the same way in which you brush your teeth. You need to think about how you're going to have a joyful day. And it's hard for a lot of people because we're not wired for that. But I think that that could be the connection that we make in order to bring it into our lives.

Third, it's about building community around it. Joy is amplified when we share it. Now, you have to be thoughtful around who you share it with and if it's the time to share it. You make those personal decisions based on your personal life. But I think what I've learned just by talking about joy on my social media platforms is that people want to talk about joy and it builds a really nice community of other people that are thinking about joy too.

And then lastly, I would just say you have to protect your joy, y'all. You have to protect your joy to have boundaries that keep toxicity and overwork and burnout at bay. And so I think in a time of crisis, a joy plan becomes a roadmap for healing that we need.

That's incredible and so helpful. I hope everyone who's listening can really like was writing down steps one through four.

I mean, I'm this is, you know, and I also I really love number four, which is you have to protect your joy. Because that idea of protecting your joy. Isn't that something that is so much more fulfilling than answering a question about how do you deal with the work life balance?

You know, I mean, you have shifted that whole conversation, and I think the whole core of it, how do we protect our joy? And I think, years ago, I wrote just a short piece with someone who actually came across this 15th century word on a British talk show, which I love that origin story because sometimes that's how research happens, right? As you're watching Countdown, in London and you figure out, oh, look at this word and the word is "respair."

And it is a combination of both hope and despair, but more it's about how you emerge from a moment of despair with hope.

And it's, like you said, Desmond, we're in a moment that is often, as people have said, cruelty is the point. And it is often something that is not about care. And so I think developing a joy plan is really sustaining in this moment.

And I think that it's also important because, we often write, we are critical thinkers. You're a social worker, you're a sociologist, you were trained, you said earlier, to identify problems. There are lots of problems that grab our attention.

And I think that a lot of us study really, really difficult and often traumatic things, whether that's racism or gun violence or gender and care and a sort of class kind of precarity that you study, Julia, and so, I guess my question is why do you think, Julia, it's important to study joy alongside struggle and resistance?

I mean, this is going to be a peak sociologist's answer, but like, you're going to miss stuff if you're not looking for happy things.

Um, if you're not looking for what, in studying what I do, you know, what people do all day while they're at work and why they do it, you're gonna miss a major part of the motivation for why people choose to do the things that they do, right?

The women who I've interviewed across the country who take care of small children, maybe they started doing it because they got laid off from their hospital job, or their job as a public school teacher's aide or something like that, or they had to take a break from work because they had to care for an elderly relative or something like that, and they just couldn't get back into the workforce for whatever reason.

They faced age discrimination, racial discrimination, gender discrimination, as well as depressed wages, of workers who are in those fields. And so they said, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to go private, right? I'm going to work for people in their private homes and take care of these babies, and really be a part of these families' lives.

And if you only tell the first story about discrimination and blocked opportunity, you miss the second story, which is really the meat and potato, the bread and butters of these women's everyday lives, which is being an essential, a crucial, the most essential person in a family, in order to support an employed mother's work, in order to support a growing and developing child, in order to support a person with special needs potentially who's not well served within a public school setting or within a more institutional care setting.

That's what, for, again, not for everybody, but for a lot of folks, that's what gives the work meaning. And without asking about those things, without recognizing that those things exist, and make our working lives what they are, you're just doing bad science. So I think that's a really important part of that.

But, you know, it's also, as a researcher, that you have to find ways to think or to see the joy that people take in solving problems, right? And I know this is something we talked about on the phone call before, but another story from the field is, when I started interviewing nannies.

They were all telling me about the importance of Facebook, that Facebook has become really, really important for how they find jobs, which was kind of unexpected for me, but they all had a lot of questions that they wanted answered about these Facebook groups where they were actively looking for work.

Who's running these groups? Why do they do it? What's their angle? Are they getting paid by somebody? Please find these answers for us, Julia, because we don't have the time to.

And so I went and I looked, right? And I looked for the moderators of these groups. I found them, and I interviewed them, and most of them were moms, or people who were formerly looking for care, but whose kids are now older.

And who said, I'm just doing this because it felt like an important thing to do. Um, and now I do it because I've heard that without it, people aren't going to find the care that they need. And this gives my life great meaning, um, to be able to spend hours a day moderating this Facebook group where people are able to broker this completely informal market for care.

They're getting absolutely nothing out of it and actually paying a lot in terms of their own time, and adjudicating, you know, all of these posts. And I think with only looking at that with my critical hat on and saying, like, you know, what are these people's kind of ulterior motives or what kind of control are they trying to have over the situation?

I would have missed, I think, uh, the, the major motivation for why these groups exist and why this informal market works the way it does.

I know we're running out of time, and so I want to ask kind of one last question because we always remember that we are at the Annenberg School for Communication, and we do study communication and media, and so I want to ask you both, what do you think, the relationship between the media between platforms, whether or not that's, you just talked about Facebook, Julia, so that could be one thing, but there's also AI, there's also different kinds of media platforms.

What is the relationship between that kind of media and care?

You know, I really love Julia's example because I think what it underscores is that technology redistributes and amplifies care, right? In that, you can use these platforms to connect with people who share similar experiences or have resources or various forms of social support that you might need or that you can provide for other folks as well.

And so it gives you both formal and informal connections that can really help you create a thriving and healthy life. I think it can also give you a platform to share about those amazing things that are happening in your life or how you received a form of care that was transformative. And this has been happening to me personally.

I have been using my Facebook and my LinkedIn platforms to share various ideas about Joy and the Joy Plan. And at every post, I ask people to then tell me what they're thinking or what they're doing in this space, and people are engaging. I didn't think people would. And it's been really fun to just read people's posts.

People are reading, they're experiencing music, they're putting their feet in dirt, and they're walking around. They're doing things that are both practical and easy, but also they're thinking about the aspirational. My aunt, I talk a lot about my aunt Sandy. She's all about joy, and she puts on all types of hats that make her feel good, right?

Because we’re from the South, and, you know, Black women wear hats in the South. She creates these plants and hearths and all types of things that is a very new thing for her, but it's something that she has control over. That she can focus on, and she can amplify through her social media channels.

And I don't think we've understood the promise of social media in that way, but it's been illustrated time and time again by folks who are just living their day-to-day life and finding those connections. And so I think that we have to demand through advocacy and through our research that platforms focus on care.

What would it mean if your product designers were focused on care and joy? What would our experiences look like? How would people grow? How would people connect? I have hope and there's possibility that if we center care in how these platforms are developed and how we connect on the platforms, then we can have a different experience.

Yeah, that that's amazing.

A great answer. I also think that when you were talking about your aunt, that it reminded me of something that Julia said about like, you know, your sociologist answer, like, why do we study joy alongside resistance? Because if we didn't, we would be missing something. And when, you know, I've done a lot of work on like the self-promotion and self-branding of people on social media,

and it's easy when you're focused only on that to forget that Sandy is like using it to talk about her hats and that gives her joy and it gives people listening to her joy. And so I think that that's also part of the media landscape. We tend to focus on those parts of it that can be exploitative or extractive or oppressive, and the media can also open up spaces for joy in really important ways.

And I don't know, Julia, if you have thoughts about this as well?

I totally, of course I do, you know?

(LAUGHTER)

Good, I'm very happy. You have not disappointed me.

You know, I think about some of the original formulations of the theorists who were thinking about these new digital spaces, you know, in the early, late nineties, early two-thousands, Tiziana Terranova's conceptualization of digital labor, right?

It's simultaneously unwaged and pleasurable and exploited, and right, like it's all of these things at once. And if it wasn't so complicated, it wouldn't be interesting, right? Like, I think you're absolutely right, Sarah, that when we think about critical scholarship in this area, that oftentimes

we tend towards the kind of unmasking move, right?

Or the kind of like, you're all working for the platform now, people. Don't you all see this, that you're all being exploited? And like, yeah, maybe, right? But it doesn't mean that we're not also getting some really important and meaningful forms of pleasure and joy from these same activities.

One of the original case studies of the labor in this context were AOL moderators, right, who were working for free to sustain these communities. AOL, the company, started relying on these folks because of the deep investments that they had in these rooms, right, that they created.

They curated conversations. They made sure that conversations were civil and were on topic, and they kind of kick people out when they needed to be kicked out and led people back to the center of the conversation when they needed to be included, right? These are works of care for creating these original AOL communities.

AOL started relying on them a little bit too much and then took away the kind of incentives, the very small incentives, that they had to keep doing that labor. And they got mad, the volunteer moderators, right? And they ended up suing the company, um, much, much further down the lane. But you know, it's this complex interweaving.

It's the interplay between feelings of joy and meaning and interconnectedness and fostering community alongside the power dynamics of these platforms on top of them, right? Like, that's what makes these such thorny and interesting research issues. It wouldn't exist if we weren't getting something out of it that was, like, deeply vital to our lives as human beings, right? We just wouldn't have these problems.

And I think it's a really important kind of additional thread to braid back into our critical scholarship.

I don't think that that's too positive. I mean, one of the things that you kind of talked about when you were talking about IRB and we're talking about the sort of transactional nature of some care work, you've written a lot about the bureaucratization of care. It's not that you're not a critical scholar, right?

But I think that it sounds like at least from both of you, what draws you to this kind of work from your different vantage points is a commitment to protecting that joy, a commitment to the idea that care is essential.

You had said early on, Desmond, that care is relational. That one of the things that I got out of this conversation and talking with both of you and reading both of your work is that there's this idea that somehow being dependent on others is a sign of weakness and a sign that you're not individual enough, you're not autonomous enough.

And I think what's so important about your work, both of you, is this insistence that dependency is not a weakness. It is a function of care and it is a function of joy and we can see that through things like mutual aid and different ways of forming community, ways of sustaining each other during moments of crisis.

And I just feel really, really fortunate that I get to work at a place where two brilliant colleagues, their work is focused on this really important issue.

And again, I'm just so grateful that the two of you joined me today. So thank you so much.

Thank you for having us.

Thank you again for joining us. This was such a fascinating discussion. And please look forward to the next episode of Annenberg Conversations.