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Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds (Volume 41)
To care can feel good, or it can feel bad. It can do good, it can oppress. But what is care? A moral obligation? A burden? A joy? Is it only human? In Matters of Care, María Puig de la Bellacasa presents a powerful challenge to conventional notions of care, exploring its significance as an ethical and political obligation for thinking in the more than human worlds of technoscience and naturecultures.
Matters of Care contests the view that care is something only humans do, and argues for extending to non-humans the consideration of agencies and communities that make the living web of care by considering how care circulates in the natural world. The first of the book’s two parts, “Knowledge Politics,” defines the motivations for expanding the ethico-political meanings of care, focusing on discussions in science and technology that engage with sociotechnical assemblages and objects as lively, politically charged “things.” The second part, “Speculative Ethics in Antiecological Times,” considers everyday ecologies of sustaining and perpetuating life for their potential to transform our entrenched relations to natural worlds as “resources.”
From the ethics and politics of care to experiential research on care to feminist science and technology studies, Matters of Care is a singular contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary debate that expands agency beyond the human to ask how our understandings of care must shift if we broaden the world.
Matters of Care contests the view that care is something only humans do, and argues for extending to non-humans the consideration of agencies and communities that make the living web of care by considering how care circulates in the natural world. The first of the book’s two parts, “Knowledge Politics,” defines the motivations for expanding the ethico-political meanings of care, focusing on discussions in science and technology that engage with sociotechnical assemblages and objects as lively, politically charged “things.” The second part, “Speculative Ethics in Antiecological Times,” considers everyday ecologies of sustaining and perpetuating life for their potential to transform our entrenched relations to natural worlds as “resources.”
From the ethics and politics of care to experiential research on care to feminist science and technology studies, Matters of Care is a singular contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary debate that expands agency beyond the human to ask how our understandings of care must shift if we broaden the world.
280 pages, Paperback
Published March 21, 2017
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June 4, 2019
This is a densely written book. I have to admit that I had to re-read many pages to fully understand what was being said. This effort was, overall, rewarding.
I was most interested in a series of questions she poses: "How do we actively engage with the lived experiences of forms of nonhuman bios whose existences are today increasingly incorporated in the cultural world of human techne? How do we acknowledge “their” agency, and our involvement with it, without denying the asymmetrical power historically developed by human agencies in bios? How do we engage with accountable forms of ethico-political caring that respond to alterity without nurturing purist separations between humans and nonhumans? How do we engage with the care of Earth and its beings without idealizing nature nor diminishing human response-ability by seeing it as either inevitably destructive or mere paternalistic stewardship?" (p.144).
Puig de la Bellacasa does an admirable job answering these questions in her discussions on permaculture, and the metaphor (?) of the soil: "In this conception, soil is not just a habitat or medium for plants and organisms; nor is it just decomposed material, the organic and mineral end product of organism activity. Organisms are soil. A lively soil can only exist with and through a multispecies community of biota that makes it, that contributes to its creation" (p.189).
I was most interested in a series of questions she poses: "How do we actively engage with the lived experiences of forms of nonhuman bios whose existences are today increasingly incorporated in the cultural world of human techne? How do we acknowledge “their” agency, and our involvement with it, without denying the asymmetrical power historically developed by human agencies in bios? How do we engage with accountable forms of ethico-political caring that respond to alterity without nurturing purist separations between humans and nonhumans? How do we engage with the care of Earth and its beings without idealizing nature nor diminishing human response-ability by seeing it as either inevitably destructive or mere paternalistic stewardship?" (p.144).
Puig de la Bellacasa does an admirable job answering these questions in her discussions on permaculture, and the metaphor (?) of the soil: "In this conception, soil is not just a habitat or medium for plants and organisms; nor is it just decomposed material, the organic and mineral end product of organism activity. Organisms are soil. A lively soil can only exist with and through a multispecies community of biota that makes it, that contributes to its creation" (p.189).
January 19, 2023
Wasn’t expecting to love this book so much.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews