Critical reflections on care (original) (raw)

The coronavirus global pandemic has challenged the perceptions and experiences of urban space and care. The city, which had been celebrated as the future of humanity in the twentyfirst century, became a prison for a while, as state authorities locked people inside their homes, emptying public spaces of almost all human activity. In contrast, the importance of care, particularly health and social care, became paramount. Care workers emerged as the heroes of the hour, and the significance of their work, which hitherto may have been hidden from the view and taken for granted, was now better appreciated. In this context, longstanding questions and tensions of social and ecological care are more pertinent than ever before: What does it mean to care, why is it a cause for concern, whose responsibility is it, and which claims to care can be believed? To investigate the precarious state of care, this chapter provides some critical reflections on the contexts, concepts, and practices of care. It is structured into three parts. The first part examines the context of the rising attention to care. It locates the concern for care in the larger context of an 'age of carelessness,' with its misplaced sense of confidence, and its intended and unintended consequences, as reflected in and exacerbated by the crises of economic globalization and climate change. The second part investigates the concepts of care, as a relation between need and ability and a response to vulnerability and precarity. It raises questions of who provides and who receives care, the relations of power that are involved, and the threats and gaps that emerge in the commodification of care. The concept of care is examined in relation to social and ecological challenges through the notions of solidarity and reciprocity. The third part provides a critique of some practices of care and how they may be subject to misuse and false claims, as shown in some examples of the different forms of social and ecological care, asking whether some claims to care can stand up to critical scrutiny. Context of Care: The Age of Carelessness The broad historical context for the emergence of a concern for care is the extent to which the urbanized industrial society has transformed the world since the early nineteenth century, triggering what has been named the Anthropocene. Through a combination of ignorance and 2