This paper aims to encourage an ethos of care in the study of science and technology. It starts with a reading of Bruno Latour's notion of'matters of concern' as favouring an awareness of the ethico-political effects of constructivist accounts in STS. Introducing attention to concern brings us closer to a notion of care. However, there is a'critical' edge to care that Latour's politics of things tends to disregard. Drawing upon feminist knowledge politics, I propose to treat matters of fact and sociotechnical assemblages as 'matters of care' and argue that engaging with care requires a speculative commitment to neglected things.

What is the significance of caring for thinking and knowing? Thinking and knowing are essentially relational processes. Grounded on a relational conception of ontology the essay argues that ‘thinking with care’ is a vital requisite of collective thinking in interdependent worlds, but also one that necessitates a thick vision of caring. A speculative exploration of forms of thinking with care unfolds through a rereading of Donna Haraway's work, specifically of its take on feminist discussions on the situated character of knowledge. The notion of thinking with care is articulated through a series of concrete moves: thinking‐with, dissenting‐within and thinking‐for. While weaving Haraway's thinking and writing practices with the trope of care offers a particular understanding of this author's knowledge politics, the task of caring also appears in a different light.

The dominant drive for understanding soil has been to pace its fertility with human demand. But today warnings about soil's exhaustion and endangered ecology raise concerns that they have been mistreated throughout history. These worries are marked by fears of gloomy environmental futures, prompting us, and specially scientists and soil practitioners to urgently develop better ways of taking care of soils. Yet the pace required by ecological soil care could be at odds with the predominant temporal orientation of technoscientific intervention: driven by an inherently progressivist, productionist and restless mode of futurity. Through a conceptual and historical approach to the soil sciences and other domains of soil knowledge the paper looks for soil ontologies and approaches to human-soil relations that are obscured by this predominant timescape. Discussions about the future of the soil sciences already expose tensions between 'progress as usual' -by intensifying productivity -and the need to protect the pace of soil renewal. However it is in the interrogation of the intimate relation of soil science with productionism, and in the emergence of soil ecology conceptions that emphasise soil as a living community rather than a receptacle for crops, that we could see emerging alternative soil ontologies and human-soil relations paced by a temporality of care. The 'foodweb' model of soil ecology in particular has become a figure of alternative human-soil relations for environmental activists and practitioners, promoting soil care practices that intensify the involvement of practitioners with soil's temporality. Reading these ways of relating to soil ways of making time for 'care time', helps to reveal a diversity of more-than-human interdependent temporalities, disrupting the anthropocentric appeal of predominant timescales of technoscientific futurity and their reductive notion of innovation.

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The sense of touch is being revalued in disparate places, from cultural theory to expanding markets of haptic technologies. In this paper I explore the potential of thinking with literal and figural meanings of touch. My standpoint inherits from discussions in feminist knowledge politics and constructivist conceptions of science and technology that problematize epistemological distances -between objects and subjects; knowledge and the world; and science and politics. In this direction, touch expresses a sense of material embodied relationality that seemingly eschews abstractions and detachments that have been associated with knowledge-as-vision. Engaging speculatively with experience, knowledge and technology as touch, I explore the differences made by touching visions.