Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds

The author examines the significance of care for thinking and living in human and nonhuman worlds from a feminist and ethics perspective. She addresses the role of knowledge politics in technoscience, alternative ways of knowing, and care in this context, through readings of Bruno Latour's and Donna Haraway's work, to understand what caring knowledge politics could mean in more than human worlds and the politics and agency of things in science and technology studies, what it would mean to think of matters of fact and socio-technical assemblages as matters of care, and how to care about the way things are constructed, presented, and studied, as well as how thought can contribute to caring thinking in living with other than humans and viewing caring thinking and knowing through the metaphor of touch. In the second part, she explores care issues in relation to nature, focusing on the practices of the permaculture movement and the transformation of human-soil relations around the idea of soil as living. Earlier versions of some chapters were previously published elsewhere. Annotation ©2017 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
To care can feel good, or it can feel bad. It can do good, it can oppress. But what is care? A moral obligation? A burden? A joy? Is it only human? In Matters of Care, María Puig de la Bellacasa presents a powerful challenge to conventional notions of care, exploring its significance as an ethical and political obligation for thinking in the more than human worlds of technoscience and naturecultures. Matters of Care contests the view that care is something only humans do, and argues for extending to non-humans the consideration of agencies and communities that make the living web of care by considering how care circulates in the natural world. The first of the book’s two parts, “Knowledge Politics,” defines the motivations for expanding the ethico-political meanings of care, focusing on discussions in science and technology that engage with sociotechnical assemblages and objects as lively, politically charged “things.” The second part, “Speculative Ethics in Antiecological Times,” considers everyday ecologies of sustaining and perpetuating life for their potential to transform our entrenched relations to natural worlds as “resources.” From the ethics and politics of care to experiential research on care to feminist science and technology studies, Matters of Care is a singular contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary debate that expands agency beyond the human to ask how our understandings of care must shift if we broaden the world.