Federica Raia

My work explores care as a relational and ontological practice that takes shape across medicine, education, and community life. I study how people learn to care for one another within complex, uncertain, and technologically mediated environments, and how practices of care make possible new ways of being, knowing, and becoming together.

Grounded in long-term ethnographic, interactional, and discourse-based analyses of practices in high-tech medicine, clinical education, and community–school–university partnerships, my scholarship examines moments in which care emerges not as a disposition or moral attitude, but as an ontological relational power that reorients learning as a process of becoming, sustains dignity, and opens possibilities for action under conditions of vulnerability, uncertainty, and institutional constraint.

Drawing on complexity science and continental phenomenology, I approach professional practice as always unfolding within relational, material, affective, and temporal worlds. Methodologically, I work at the interactional level using fine-grained video analysis of real-time practice. This approach makes visible how care is accomplished through embodied action, talk, gesture, touch, spatial arrangement, and the use of technologies, revealing how practical know-how how practical know-how sustains dignity and opens possibilities for action under conditions of vulnerability, uncertainty, and institutional constraint.

An integral dimension of my work is community-based participatory research. Through WeCREATE (Wellness Collaborative for Research & Education Activities to Transform and Empower), I lead sustained partnerships among UCLA undergraduate and graduate students, medical trainees, educators, and youth from Horace Mann UCLA Community School. This work centers community knowledge, collective inquiry, and shared storytelling as forms of learning and research, positioning care as a practice that extends beyond institutions and is cultivated relationally across generations and communities.

Together, my research and teaching aim to create spaces in which care can be studied, practiced, and learned.