Description

Care has been taken up in a number of ways by geographers in recent years, particularly within feminist economic and political geography (England 2010; Green and Lawson 2011; Raghuram 2016), as well as urban geography (Power and Williams 2019). Further, care’s prominence in hegemonic public discourse appears to be increasing, with some scholars warning of the term’s cooptation by corporate and conservative actors (Chatzidakis et al. 2020). Though, considerations of care must also be placed within a long history of Black and Brown organizing. This underscores the significance of “radical care” as one avenue through which to counter this cooptation and redirect the path forward for studies, practices, and politics of care (Wood et al. 2020; Hobart and Kneese 2020).

In this virtual paper session, we look to connect scholars who are thinking about the futures of care geographies. We aim to bring together researchers who broadly engage with care theory in their work in some way, including through: gendered and racialized care labor, politics of care, feminist care ethics, representations of care, care networks, uncaring care, or other framings that help us to understand care in different ways. We are particularly interested in ways that power, politics, identity, and socio-spatial processes intersect to shape how we understand, value, and think about care. We also encourage work that “stretches the boundaries of care” and considers relationships of care in different empirical contexts (Bartos 2019). This opens possibilities for numerous orientations, including care as work, care as (radical) practice, the politics of care, and care as relationships.

This session welcomes papers that address, engage, or are inspired by any of the following:

- Attending to the ways in which care is and has historically been organized and distributed unequally within/alongside existing hierarchies of power and privilege;
- Radical care as collective responses to present crises and precarious futures;
- Ways that the current crisis(es) open up new possibilities for reorganizing, revaluing, and redistributing care;
- Who and what are/can be the subjects and providers of care;
- Rethinking hierarchies of relationships of care;
- Centering a praxis of care as enabling us/communities to lay the foundations for alternative futures, imagined futures, and futures beyond those seemingly possible under neoliberal capitalism;
- What it means to “analyse the world through the lens of care” (Schwiter and Steiner 2020)
- Intersectionality and feminist care ethics (Crenshaw 1989)
- Theorizing care ethics beyond the global North (Raghuram 2016; Montes and Paris Pombo 2019)
- Connections between “responsibility to care” and neoliberal discourses of “personal responsibility,” drawing on postcolonial studies (Raghuram et al. 2009)



References

Bartos, Ann. E. 2019. “Introduction: Stretching the Boundaries of Care.” Gender, Place & Culture 26(6): 767–777.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1(8): 139-167.
England, Kim. 2010. “Home, Work and the Shifting Geographies of Care.” Ethics, Place & Environment 13(2): 131–150.
Green, Maia and Victoria Lawson. 2011. “Recentring care: interrogating the commodification of care.” Social & Cultural Geography 12(6):639–654.
Herrera, Juan. 2015. “Spatializing Chicano Power: Cartographic Memory and Community Practices of Care.” Social Justice 42(3/4): 46-66.
Hobart, Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani and Tamara Kneese. 2020. “Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times.” Social Text 38 (1 (142)): 1–16.
Iacovone, Chiara, Alberto Valz Gris, Astrid Safina, Andrea Pollio, and Francesca Governa. 2020. “Breaking the Distance: Dialogues of Care in a Time of Limited Geographies.” Dialogues in Human Geography 10(2): 124–127.
Lawson, Victoria. 2007. “Geographies of Care and Responsibility.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97(1): 1–11.
Malatino, Hil. 2020. Trans Care. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Milligan, Christine and Janine Wiles. 2010. “Landscapes of Care.” Progress in Human Geography 34(6): 736–754.
Montes, Verónica and María Dolores Paris Pombo. 2019. “Ethics of Care, Emotional Work, and Collective Action of Solidarity: The Patronas in Mexico.” Gender, Place & Culture 26(4): 559–580.
Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. 2018. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press.
Power, Emma. R. and Miriam J Williams. 2019. “Cities of Care: A Platform for Urban Geographical Care Research.” Geography Compass 14(1): 1–11.
Raghuram, Parvati. 2016. “Locating Care Ethics Beyond the Global North.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 15(3): 511–513.
Raghuram, Parvati. 2019. “Race and Feminist Care Ethics: Intersectionality as Method.” Gender, Place & Culture 26(5): 613–637.
Schwiter, Karin and Jennifer Steiner. 2020. "Geographies of Care Work: The Commodification of Care, Digital Care Futures and Alternative Caring Visions." Geography Compass (2020): e12546.
The Care Collective. 2020. The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence. London: Verso.
Wood, Lydia, Kate Swanson, and Donald Colley III. 2020. “Tenets For a Radical Care Ethics in Geography.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 19(2): 424-47.