Painting by Soul Eom
By Harriet Faye Sanderson
As someone studying abroad, I’ve quickly discovered the way that being in unfamiliar environments and estranged from certain care networks forces you to think about care more than ever before. I came into this project wanting to explore how other people experience and adapt to these situations as young adults in transitional life stages abroad. From a sociological perspective, to understand the ways that societal changes are impacting everyday behaviour and how we can resist through care and also personally, as a kind of celebration of how care produces worlds and opportunities for people. However, it quickly became clear that this is no simple process. Care is conceptually and practically complex; difficult to define, vulnerable to discuss and occurring across macro and micro levels simultaneously.
Throughout this post, and my project, I intend to lean into these tensions in care and the uncertainties I have encountered thus far. I will do this through a lens of feminist epistemology (Haraway, 1988), embracing situated knowledge and lived experience, allowing participants to articulate care on their own terms.
To do this, I will often accompany my discussion with findings from the ETHOS playfair – in which I presented three jars (giving, receiving, sharing) and asked people to select tokens which represented modes of care (financial, emotional support, practical help etc) and note down a moment that came to mind on the token, placing it in the corresponding jar.
Sentiment vs Maintenance
In a globalised, highly reflexive society, individuals are increasingly required to navigate care across shifting social relations, institutional constraints and material limitations (Giddens, 2008). In this climate, physical distance and lack of resources have produced new, creative forms of care. When one participant referred to sending memes to a long distance friend (figure 1), I was compelled to question what ‘counts’ as care under such conditions.
Classic moral philosophy tended to frame care as akin to ‘empathy’ or ‘sympathy’, as seen in the work of David Hume and Adam Smith (Noddings, 2010). Contemporary care theorist, Tronto (1998), however, asserts that care is maintenance, not simply sentiment. The participant’s example complicates this distinction, as certain sentiments do perform maintenance, via the knowledge that one is remembered or emotionally held. Nonetheless, feminist scholars, including bell hooks (1999) warn that sentimental or superficial notions of care can reproduce hierarchies or paternalism if not accompanied by active engagement or accountability.
Figure 1.
It is clear though, that this individual does not see sending memes as the sole means of caring for their friend, instead as one step in a broader relational practice. This act reminded me of Butler’s (2021) account of recognition, in which acknowledging another person’s vulnerability becomes an ethical and political act. In conditions where precarity renders certain lives invisible or unsupported, care operates as a mode of recognition, affirming interdependence and resisting abandonment. Digital gestures may thus function as connective fabric within care networks, maintaining relational bonds across distance while remaining embedded within (yet resistive of) larger structures.
Structural Constraints
While care can be intimate and relational, it is never detached from power. In many situations, ideas of care push individuals into situations of unpaid labour and surveillance and can reproduce hierarchies by determining who is entitled to care and who is not (Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart, Kneese, 2020). Acts of care can also often lead to vacuums in state functions, in which healthcare and childcare systems are functional due to the unpaid or devalued work performed by poor women, immigrants or family members (ibid). This is something I sensed within peoples contributions, who felt a distinct awareness about their social position, and the way care illuminates labour, making it difficult to accept (Figure 2). One person explained the way their friends constructed a ‘care plan’ when they became disabled after an injury. I found this example poignant for exposing when institutions fail to show up, and therefore when informal care networks become necessary, not merely pleasant. They articulated that this was difficult to accept, and hard to believe they were not a burden – akin to how other participants explain struggles with financial gifts or assistance, often emphasising their class status and dependencies.
Figure 2.
Nevertheless, Noddings (2010) emphasises that even in relations which are inherently unequal (such as parent-child, physician-patient), both individuals contribute to the relation, even indirectly; such as a student going on to pursue a discipline endorsed by their teacher without explicitly naming them in the act. It seems prefigurative in this way, that you are always reinforcing a bond, implicitly agreeing to support another if you are able to, and thus imagining and believing in a reciprocal and relational world. This relates to radical care, allowing us to envision an ‘otherwise’, disengaging from structural inequalities (Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart, Kneese, 2020).
For this concept, I have appreciated Tronto’s (2024) understanding of citizenship; contending that everybody who is in a care relation with a citizen becomes a citizen, moving beyond nationalist conceptions and becoming about who is in relation to whom. I believe this allows us to valorise the idea of being in service to others in a way that is fundamental to what we do each day, the same way we currently understand being a national citizen. This is but one way we can hope to prevent the structural undermining of care practices as trivial and performed by marginalised people.
Structural constraints not only affect who performs care but also our ability to. One participant cited their struggles as an academic acting within bureaucratic institutional lines, limiting their care praxis (Figure 3.) In her work on teaching, hooks (2014) refers to an ‘engaged pedagogy’, centering the whole person (mind, body and spirit) in the learning process. This calls for mutual respect between teacher and student and an environment where care is central – above competition and alienation. Yet, the comment from this participant reminds me that even when an individual is working towards such a system, there are inevitable interventions that prevent action. As Joan Tronto (2024) reminds us, care is not merely a personal ethic but a political and institutional practice, shaped by structures that may enable or obstruct it. This points to a larger question; what would it mean to institutionalise care ethics in spaces and societies structurally organised around competition, productivity, and individualisation?
Figure 3.
Ultimately, this project and my playfair activity is deeply rooted in ‘speculative ethics’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017), in trying to engage actively in a kind of care that attends to uncertainties and complex relationships. This involves moving beyond normative and traditional ideas of giving and receiving. Instead, I hope that by asking detailed questions and enabling personal reflection in participants, I can uncover new possibilities for caring and being in a world that is rapidly changing and producing new structural challenges. Through this process, I have become less interested in defining care, and more interested in what the possibilities are when you surrender to people’s reflexive understandings.
Next Steps
I am now looking towards my methodology for conducting research, which will centre around participatory mapping, and later lexical analysis of these maps, to uncover themes in understandings and experiences of their personal care networks. This will create the possibility for discerning gaps in institutional praxis; uncovering what can be done to make care accessible and available to those who need it – but also, importantly to me, highlighting the role of informal and personal care networks and motivating reflection on their importance as a basis for universalising care ethics.
References
Butler, J., Honneth A., Allen, A., Celikates, R., Deranty, J.-P., Ikaheimo, H., Lepold, K., Mcnay, L., Owen, D., & Stahl, T. (2021). Recognition and Ambivalence (H. Ikaheimo K. Lepld & T. Stahl, Eds.). Columbia University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/ikah17760
De La Bellacasa, M. P. (2017). Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. University of Minnesota Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt1mmfspt
Giddens, A. (2020). Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. The New Social Theory Reader, 354–361. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003060963-59
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: the Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066
Hobart, H. J. K., & Kneese, T. (2020). Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times. Social Text, 38(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-7971067
hooks, bell. (1999). All About Love: New Visions. Harper Perennial.
hooks, bell. (2014). Teaching To Transgress. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203700280 (Original work published 1994)
Iris Parra Jounou, & Tronto, J. C. (2024). Care ethics in theory and practice: Joan C. Tronto in conversation with Iris Parra Jounou. Contemporary Political Theory. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-024-00680-6
Noddings, N. (2010). Care Ethics, Caregiving, and Global Caring. Care – Wer Sorgt Für Wen?, 17–26. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvm2023j.4
Tronto, J. C. (1998). An Ethic of Care. Generations: Journal of the American Society on Aging, 22(3), 15–20. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44875693