Just care! Rethinking the uneven geographies of care

Abstract

After COVID-19 was characterised as a pandemic in spring 2020, care and care work became very dominant topics in public discourse in Western Europe. Against this backdrop, the paper turns to the underlying social structures and conditions of caring relations and aims to go before and beyond the pandemic. The serious occasion of the COVID-19 pandemic and its unjust social effects will be taken as a starting point to engage with social theory to discuss pre-existing uneven ‘geographies of caring relations’ in capitalist societies, which pandemic-related measures are built on. For this, the paper draws on Joan Tronto’s extended thoughts on critical feminist care ethics, emphasising her notion of caring-with as the possibility to trust in caring relations based on interdependencies and solidarity, and argues for explicitly linking caring relations to questions of social justice. This framework stresses the foundations of social injustice and shifts the perspective from individual caring subjects and places (‘who and where’) to unjust social structures (‘how’). Moreover, it challenges dominant biopolitics and care economies by way of an insourcing of caring relationships. By conceiving care as part of social theory and not only social analyses, care ethics provide a normative framework for geography and beyond to imagine and practise social change.

Uneven geographies of COVID‐19: Reviewing geographical research agendas and concepts from a syndemics perspective

“…They advocate “a praxis that foregrounds the care of community, not the privatization of care through the nuclear family nor through the over‐exploited labor of front‐line workers” (Neely & Lopez, 2022b, p. 10; cf. also Saltiel & Strüver, 2022).…”

Placing Care Work in the Future of Work Discourse

“…For example, in their working paper originally published in 2013, Frey and Osborne (2017) estimated that 47 per cent of all jobs in the United States are at high risk of automation. This incredible statement has continued to attract significant attention in the media and academia, including editorialised headlines stating half of all jobs will be automated (for example, see Rundle 2014). With over 11,000 citations in Google Scholar, Frey and Osborne's (2017) analysis is one of the most cited studies on automation and the future of work.…”