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In this introduction we argue that taking a topological approach to care can encourage us to understand both how caring relations and practices are produced and the forms they take as they shift and transform. We suggest that thinking topologically about the articles collected in this special section highlights how caring actions and practices ripple out into the world beyond immediate caring relationships and the immediate moment. Responding to a call within geographies of care to be thoroughly attuned to the placed-ness of caring relations and to contribute work that theorises from places beyond the global north, the papers in this collection are situated in diverse geographical and cultural contexts, thoroughly contextualised in place and time and explore complicated relations that shape and challenge care. The geographies of care presented in this collection are a sampling of the diverse forms of care that are possible and, we argue, that by employing a topological approach to care, the possibility of what care can be and mean multiplies and expands. K E Y W O R D S geographies of care, politics of care, topology 1 | INTRODUCTIONGeographers have sought to push the boundaries on conceptualising and problematising care, developing a body of work that demonstrates the complexity of caring relations. Building on this work, we are excited to understand how these relations are formed and how care can also involve the creation of relations that fit less comfortably within our assumptions of what care is and can be. Towards these ends, the articles in this special section explore both the mundane and the surprising forms of care that emerge in reaction to and through interaction with (an)other. In so doing, the articles demonstrate how the diverse ways in which care is shaped complicate the terrain of what it means to care, how to care, and for whom we choose to care.In this introduction, we read across the special section's articles to argue that, within their diversity, they present interesting questions about the meaning of care and caring engagement. Here we propose taking a topological approach to reading these geographies of care, which can push research and understandings of care into its interstices: the innermost intersections and gaps between objects and subjects engaged in the construction and transformation of caring relations and spaces of care. Thinking topologically allows us, in the words of Blum and Secor, to "[close] the circuit between psychic and material space" (2011) by demonstrating how our conceptualisations of care, along with practices, social structures, and human and non-human others come into relation with the spaces that we inhabit. Using a trefoil knot as a metaphor for care, we can think through both the constancy of care in human life as well as the unpredictable shapes and knots that may ensue when human hands, actions, and intentions interact in caring engagement. If we were to handle the trefoil knot and if it was made ---

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Drawing on work that explores human vulnerability and the incoherence of the subject in the process of subject formation, I build on the ideas of care as relational and connectedness within human geography. I examine how, in the process of becoming subjects of care, subjects encounter incoherence within themselves and between each other. I explore how this incoherence within and between subjects can be thought of as a disconnection, or the space in between subjects, and how the relationship of care can be conceptualised as the navigation of disconnections as those becoming subjects of care work to build connections. In this paper, I examine ethnographic data from northern Ghana, focusing in on the relationships of care that were constructed during one woman's end of life, highlighting the ways in which connections were forged across spaces of disconnect during the receipt and provision of care. Consideration of these spaces in between has the potential to contribute to our understandings of the experiences of the relational construction of care for both the recipients and providers of care. It also has the potential to contribute an understanding of the meaning and process of care that construct highly contingent and varied outcomesranging from soothing and supportive to distressing and invasivefor those involved.