by Harriet Faye Sanderson
Feelings of care, abandonment, or obligation are often treated as private matters, operating on a plane far removed from civil society and therefore unworthy of political analysis. And yet when I sat with people navigating early adulthood abroad, it was precisely here, in the texture of their relationships, that politics lived. Many quantitative studies tell us that women do a disproportionate amount of caring, that care is being privatised, and that states are withdrawing welfare (Sarrasanti et al, 2020), (Murphy, 2024). But what does it actually mean to everyday people? Who does the work when the state retreats?
Pushed by Ahmed’s (2017) assertion that feminism must be about making everything questionable, I conducted interviews with women around me who were navigating early adulthood while living abroad. Drawing from the tradition of life-course analysis, I selected a moment of transition that seemed sociologically underexamined and rich with feeling. I employed a mapping method to anchor each conversation in the person’s individual care network — their people, institutions, obligations and gaps — because I wanted care to appear tangible and real in their lives, not as an abstract concept.
The conversations surprised me, and made me hopeful about our capacity for DIY, bottom-up social care.
Being Untethered and Experiencing Transition
So much of care ethics depends on this notion that we are eternally interdependent (Gilligan, 1982), and this remains true, but moving abroad at this stage in adulthood was recalled in the interviews as being uprooted, enabling a kind of detachment akin to freedom from care. Participants noted “the rug being pulled out from under me” and “all my relationships became spread out, and I then became spread out”. This produced a dichotomy of fear and liberation, participants describing both the anxiety of untethering and a newfound freedom from obligation. Being isolated from their original care network pushed people to realise the gaps in the services around them; things such as “stressful visa processes”, “I’ve never met my student advisor here” or “It felt tricky to navigate a new health care system and all the admin”. In these moments, institutions appeared less as sites of care than as systems of management, requiring individuals to continuously prove and organise themselves in order to access support. It also exposed participants to new political precarity, with one individual citing the Trump-Greenland tensions as a moment of realising how their relation to geopolitical instability had changed, and could now alter their own sense of safety and belonging.
In this vein, there was a distinct conversation about what I’d describe as disruptive events, and their role as an almost glitch in how we go about independent living. Things such as breakups, family illness, death, elections or even COVID-19 were cited as past or ongoing glitches – and moving abroad functioned as an underlying one. These are things that stop us in our linear progression and push us to acknowledge the necessity of care to persist, leaning into Ferrarese’s (2022) conception of care as the “management of vulnerability”. These events seemed particularly poignant in this life stage, with interviewees otherwise feeling that freedom, and self-sufficiency becomes a kind of valorised orientation, until disruptive events pull us back into
the commons of care (Kenway, 2025). Kenway’s metaphorical aid for care is useful here, viewing it as a kind of mesh or web that we nurture and draw from, not as a sector of society but a species activity. Disruption and transition then pull at the fabric, and exposes the tensions in a way that felt rich for investigation.
Despite these alienating feelings around bureaucracy, within the same institutions that so frequently failed participants, some figures offered something different: a positive disruption, a humanising of bureaucracy.
“My teachers created space for me to excel and prove myself, in a way that is self-sustaining,” said one participant. Another reflected that a mentor “really saw me and what I could achieve”, and changed their life trajectory. Drawing on Mingus (2018), what distinguishes these encounters is the difference between technical access – the limited counselling sessions offered, the advisor nominally assigned – and what she calls access intimacy: the desire not just to be politely listened to or placated, but to be fully understood in a way that allows for “being human together.” It is this quality that the participants’ institutions so rarely provided structurally, and yet certain individuals within managed to offer anyway, and which, as we will see, the interviewed women actively built for each other. Returning to the dichotomy of freedom and duty in this context, it was certainly easier for some people to feel pulled away from their network than others; things such as being the eldest child in the family, having a disability or being part of a culture that inscribes the duty to care were noted as identity tags that distribute responsibility unevenly. Yet, when they did experience this freedom from obligation, comments such as “things feel more mutual and free here”, “it pushed me to independence and stronger self-care”, and “I know what I need” surfaced, implying an emancipated satisfaction. Additionally, as care can sometimes carry weight, one person claiming “I feel I need to live up to what the care has given me,” it appears natural to pull away from duty. However, this tension was not seen as making home care networks bad or migratory freedom good, but instead as something complex to be lived through. Here, hooks (1994) offers a useful way of thinking through this contradiction in her conception of love as a practice of freedom. Care here was not experienced simply as sacrifice or subordination, but as an active recognition of another person’s subjecthood. Precisely because care can be withdrawn or refused, its intentional cultivation carries political significance.
Building From Scratch
In the context outlined above, where people feel untangled, “naked”, “like I’m spinning hundreds of plates”, what emerges to hold people together? I found that while old arrangements dissolved, the women interviewed built new networks. They noted sharing resources, whether air mattresses, books, food, or university notes and assisted each other with accessing new, unfamiliar services, such as doctor appointments or language classes. They began hosting quiz nights and established new rituals that enshrine community. They invited people to dinner and offered advice and emotional aid. They voiced holding space
for identity evolution, claiming that a good care network doesn’t just meet your needs as they are, but holds room for you to become differently needing. This may seem like mere friendship, but it functions as a politicised moment. As Costello (2022) argues about the pandemic and its effect of bringing care to the centre of social programmes, creating new infrastructure to “hold up lives” – it seemed to me that moving abroad enabled the same rupture: when these women felt left behind by their institutions, they nurtured their informal networks of care, and invested considerable time and resources into their flourishing. It is a true prefigurative politics, in which people desiring change in their social worlds embody it in the here and now.
Interestingly, participants often described becoming more intentional about who they invested care into. Men were notably peripheral within many of these networks and, when reflecting on this, several participants expressed difficulty achieving the level of intimacy or mutual recognition they associated with meaningful care. As one participant explained, certain relationships “never became close” because emotional openness and sustained attentiveness were not reciprocated. This resonates with Jackson’s (1993) notion of an emotional literacy gap, in which Western masculinity often leaves men structurally underprepared for the practices of emotional articulation and maintenance that women have often been socialised into, or compelled toward through necessity
What emerged, then, was not exclusion so much as a growing consciousness around the value of care labour itself. Participants appeared increasingly unwilling to endlessly extend emotional energy into relationships that did not nourish them. In this sense, these networks reminded me of Graeber’s (2019) notion of a “revolt of the caring classes,” though enacted on an interpersonal scale. Graeber argues that those responsible for sustaining bodies, minds, and relationships are systematically devalued despite performing the labour most essential to economic and collective life. Yet this devaluation can also produce political recognition: an awareness of care not as a naturalised feminine duty, but as skilled and socially foundational work. Within these networks, that recognition fostered an implicit politics of reciprocity, where care and freedom were
understood not as oppositional, but mutually sustaining values, enabling greater intentionality around how and where care is offered.
While I felt these networks were resistive and inventive of new reclaimed modes of autonomous caring, they are also difficult at times, and embody what Ahmed frames as the homework of a feminist life, realising how to live and embody emancipatory praxis in the formal, domestic and personal spheres. I here take on her notion of a “sweaty concept”, an idea formed through the bodily experience of not being accommodated by the world – as it is this frustration, this distrust of how people cast care work from the outside, that makes it so fundamental to work through, and live through collectively.
Language and Hopeful Engagement
Alongside the interviews, I conducted a small exercise in futurity at the ETHOS playfair. I asked people to map the gaps they felt in their present care (the places where the web had holes, where they were left unmet) and then to imagine forward into possibility. What could care look like? What would they build if they could? I wanted to sit with care not only as something to be
analysed but as something to assist in political imagination. The responses were not utopian, but specific and practical. Rent-free futures. Parallel play. Body doubling. Standing appointments. YouTube screen-share hangouts that are disability-friendly. Removing the necessity to mask in formal situations. Overcoming the formalisation of friendship. And on the gaps side: rent-increasing stress, high-admin-heavy social lives, the pressure to always be the one who travels to meet people, the longing for a form of togetherness that is tactile and difficult to ask for. I offered images to prompt thought and make something
that is so hard for us to articulate, easier.
I include these not as data in the conventional sense but because they do something that prosecannot. They show that people are not only diagnosing what is broken but are also capable ofactively pioneering new futures. Care for them is not a fixed inheritance to be received or declined. It is a practice, a project, something being made and remade in the present tense.
This matters because I began this project with a genuine concern about our social scaffolding for care. Several participants spoke about grandparents or older relatives as carriers of a different care logic; one grounded in proximity, obligation and ritual. Care appeared embedded into daily practice: cooking for neighbours, multigenerational households, open-door hospitality, and
religious or familial expectations of service. While participants did not necessarily romanticise these arrangements, many sensed that contemporary mobility and individualisation had fractured the conditions that once made such forms of care feel ordinary. I thus wondered whether my participants would be of a generation that found themselves without a template. What I found instead was something invented rather than received; chosen, conscious, and held to a standard. The experience of caring for and being cared for puts us in touch with parts of existence that are real and genuine (Gopnik, 2021) — and perhaps the inadequacy of our language for it is itself a political problem, a symptom of how thoroughly care has been
organised out of public life and into private silence.
This piece has been, among other things, an attempt to produce care discourse — to insist that what happens in a shared flat in this city, the food eaten, the bed offered, the opening for someone to become a different version of themselves, is political. That the feelings are data. That the labour is real, and the people doing it deserve more than to be cited when useful and
forgotten when not.
Care is active. It is alive and always being reshaped by the people doing it. My work has tried to make that visible, and to sit with it as something worth building toward societally.
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