Accounting for care within human geography

Abstract

Drawing on in‐depth interviews with first‐time parents in the city of Oxford, we offer a critical examination of how notions of care can transform practices of research and analysis within human geography. We argue care offers a committed practice of knowing and relating within research where data collection, analysis, and scholarly narratives are all implicated in the remaking of everyday worlds that, in turn, reveal a new terrain of political potentiality.

Whose city? Which sociality?

“…An illustrative contrast comes from approaches informed by feminist thinking on care and positionality, which prioritize the processes of situated reasoning – grounded in interaction, skilled engagement, situated attentiveness, and ongoing moral accountability (Tronto, 1993 ) – above and beyond the drawing of abstract categories of judgment which are held to be the same, wherever they are applied. As we have argued elsewhere (Middleton & Samanani, 2021 ), such approaches remind us of two vital things: first that everyday life is full of attempts to negotiate between contending values, possible futures, and political conflicts; and secondly that analytical moves to abstract from a narrative, a vignette, a set of laws, a text, and so on, to say what it is really “about”, necessarily obscure and devalue these complex negotiations – foreclosing or overlooking countless movements of everyday potential that sustain the world and/or make it otherwise. When it comes to social infrastructures, by reifying this category, we may risk only attuning ourselves to, and championing that which has the scale, visibility, and concreteness associated with typically grand, systemic, “public” visions of infrastructure; we risk paying more attention to highways and community centers than we do to the ways in which black American women, for example, have shared ways of making “homeplaces” for generations that provide collective means of refuge, endurance, and dignity, against systematic forms of deprivation and denigration (Hooks, 1990 ).…”

Analysis of Human Geography Space Based on Geographic Information System in the Context of Rural Revitalization

“…In terms of functional lag and residential function, the traditional residential space does not match modern life, and the urbanized centralized public space rural planning and design do not meet the villagers' habits of interaction and living nearby; in terms of service function, the villages lack production facilities such as primary production of agricultural products and deep processing space, and living facilities such as elderly facilities and related support, and the development of service support cannot keep up with the speed of rural development; in terms of transportation function, some agricultural production roads are missing, unable to meet the basic user needs of villagers, affecting the stability of villagers' lives and the convenience of production, and seriously reducing the quality of life. The essential principle is shown in the formula [ 13 ]. As the key formula of the article, the importance of the first formula in the article is self-evident.…”

Caring for survivors of domestic abuse: love, violence and safe space

“…Recent academic research and writing has greatly increased understanding of the experiences of care and of the social, political and economic landscapes within which care is located (Bowlby, 2012;Milligan & Wiles, 2010;Puig De La Bellacassa, 2012;Tronto, 2006). A number of excellent reviews (for discussion see Middleton & Samanani, 2021) have charted the main contributions of this literature, noting its development from initial medically orientated questions about the formal provision of care services to broader perspectives around who cares and is cared for and where care happens. Such perspectives have included a focus on the practices of care and on issues of equality, power and access.…”