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Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds
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.
278 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 21, 2017
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July 4, 2025
It's hard to rate this book because I feel like a 4 star rating implies that I would recommend it, and I truly would not, unless you're trying to write a thesis or want to explore on a much deeper level ideas that Robin Wall Kimmerer gets at wrt reciprocity, or you just love reading really dense and philosophical ecofeminist books that interrogate care. In complicating quite varied and dogmatic approaches to eco/feminist conceptions of care and relationality, Puig de la Bellacasa goes in many different directions, but it does ultimately feel quite grounded and centered in the ideas explored. Of course, the sheer denseness of the language here simply cannot be overstated. I would say the great majority of the sentences in this book are at least four lines long. But it's better at what its trying to argue than Feminism, Capitalism, & Ecology by Johanna Oksala, which we also read for lesbian feminist book club. Basically, I enjoyed this book, but it's not a new favorite or incredibly groundbreaking for me, partially because I'm not so immersed in the ideas this book explores and partially because its not necessarily my style of nonfiction. There's a lot of critiquing critique in here though, which I generally appreciate!
January 26, 2023
Comps reading. I first encountered this book at 4S in 2021, which was supposed to be held in Toronto, but was online because of the pandemic. Multiple panels I attended then had speakers who recommended this book. This past 4S, Puig de la Bellacasa was explicitly cited by the organizers of the panel I presented on, and consequently ended up in my paper. I’ve found some stuff in this book useful and productive, but it was not the book I anticipated. I’m not as invested in theorizations of affect, but maybe I just need to read more Sara Ahmed.
The book’s premise (if I can vulgarly reduce it to a simple question) is: if agency extends beyond humans, why should not ‘care’? That is, other organisms, forms of life, assemblages and “things” can be thought of as exhibiting care, and can challenge our notions of what it means to care. I think the book’s primary adversary here is a type of utilitarian environmentalist who speaks in the language of ‘natural resources’ and ‘ecosystem services’ — something I encountered as a grad student in environmental engineering, and found very irksome and annoying. That being said, Latour is not my favourite STS figure, and we cannot seem to escape his gravitational pull as a discipline. Though this book in many ways is a critique of Latour, it centres on the theoretical apparatuses he established. To illustrate his influence, Latour’s name is mentioned roughly ten times more than Marx. However, one interesting thing is it's Marxist feminists who Puig de la Bellacasa traces her interest in 'care' back to:
“Thus the book starts by engaging with discussions in science and technology studies (STS) that address the “more than human worlds” of sociotechnical assemblages and objects as lively politically charged “things.” These three chapters are marked by the context of my own encounter with the notion of care through feminist work that is not typically identified with discussions of care. Early Marxist-feminist materialist thinking from the late 1980s, often known as “standpoint feminist theory,” explored the possibility of a feminist epistemology and rooted the hopeful prospect of alternative ways of knowing in the materiality of women’s and other marginalized people’s everyday experiences.
…Care here is featured as a part of those labors that mediated with the material world, in particular domestic and family care labors, traditionally the realm, and existential confinement, of women, especially from underprivileged class and racial backgrounds. One particular text associated with such discussions marked me. Hand, Brain, and Heart: A Feminist Epistemology for the Natural Sciences, by the British feminist sociologist of science Hilary Rose, explored the political significance of caring to subvert the industrial-military-scientific complex (1983; 1994). She spoke of women’s movements such as the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp against nuclear weapons, which used symbols of care to create disruption, threading baby socks into wired fences, but also displaced women’s identity as caring mothers into a public sphere of direct action against nuclear weapons—and were sadly disqualified as bad mothers for leaving families behind to do so. Rose also spoke of aerospace workers who moved from participating in the manufacture of war technologies to designing socially beneficial technologies. Like others, Rose saw care as grounded in the material conditions of women’s reproductive labors, and she associated care with the working dimension of love, but the gist of her project was to bring the obligation of care as a way to contest the dominant ways of knowledge and science production in technoscience.”
Once you get through this genealogy, you arrive at the Latourian stuff, which discusses how technological artefacts like Boyle’s air pump (so marvellously treated by Shapin and Schaffer), have been mistakenly thought of as ‘objects’ rather than hybrid agents that make things happen:
“Coming back to We have never been modern, we can recall the refreshing immersion into the Middle Kingdom, a world of epistemologically puzzling yet ontologically robust hybrids—from global geopolitical entities such as the hole in the ozone layer to prelaboratory devices such as Robert Boyle’s legendary air pump. These, Latour argued, had been mistreated as “objects” by the philosophies pledged to the “Modern Constitution”—an arrangement of binary purifications that cuts through the complex human–nonhuman mediations that hybrids make happen (and that make hybrids happen) splitting apart their naturecultural, realconstructed, sosialscientific, discursivematerials modes of existence (Latour 1993). Another bad habit of the modern ethos, of the impulse to crack things open, is a gusto for purist dissection, coupled with the dismissive othering of those who do not dissect (e.g., fetishists or premoderns) and, eventually, with the reduction of the objectified part of the binary to the other (e.g., technology as object of humans, or vice versa). “Matter of fact” appeared as a poor epistemological category born to this modern tradition that reduces the rich recalcitrant reality of proliferating entities. But while modern thinking kept being utterly wrong about what makes the world go round, in the Middle Kingdom hybrids thrived nonchalant about misled philosophical binaries: the world of mediations is what always was—we had never been (really) modern.”
And Puig de la Bellacasa then goes on to explain how we get from ‘matters of fact’ through to ‘matters of concern’ and then ‘matters of care’:
“Part of this approach involves that “when agencies are introduced, they are never presented simply as matters of fact, but always as matters of concern, with their mode of fabrication and their stabilizing mechanisms clearly visible” (Latour 2004b, 246, emphasis added). MoC provided a new conceptual tool for this well-explored task: the restaging of things as lively. This aesthetics helps us to resist to what Alfred North Whitehead called the “bifurcation of nature,” which splits feelings, meanings, and the like, from the hardcore facts”
Whitehead generated an entire body of theological theorizing known as "process theology" that I know many Marxist liberation theologians are mildly allergic to, but many process theologians like liberation theologians. One queer friend I have who's at Emmanuel College at UofT, says the two main camps in seminary are the process theology people and the Barthian Calvinists, both of which they feel no affinity for. Anyway, back from this diversion, and a bit more on Whitehead's influence here:
“…thought together with other meanings aimed at naming the “many” that makes a “thing”—such as “society” (inspired by Gabriel Tarde’s sociology and again Whitehead’s metaphysics), a “collective,” an “assembly,” or an “association.” Thus here its renaming as “thing” aims to convey a more lively perception, understanding and restaging, of the misnamed objectified matter of fact: aesthetics is politics… To be able to think things as such, Latour argues for a new sense of “empirical philosophy” diverging from “flat” empiricist epistemology, one that would place us in the flow of this moving experience. Instead of bridging worlds, we can “drift” in what Whitehead called the “passage of nature” (a more poetic view of Latour’s Middle Kingdom), in the dense troubled waters of “what is given into experience” (Latour 2005d, 4)”
This theorization is within an intellectual lineage that many have come to associate, almost wholesale, with the entirety of STS, and is a theoretical commitment that a number of Marxists have been very dissatisfied with. For instance, Stuart Newman (in a 2022 paper on new materialism in the journal Marxism & Sciences) finds the “flat ontology” of assemblages, and new materialism more broadly, as unsatisfying theoretical frameworks, because for him, they “demote the specificity of life and its living matter” by refusing to allow for strong enough distinctions between forms of life and and non-living entities. More generally Newman believes anti-essentialism, while productive in some contexts such as gender, “cannot serve as a consistent scientific program.” One tension here lies between reification on the one hand, and more-than-human agency on the other. We see Ahmed frame emotional “affects” as taking on a life of their own in the same way commodities did for Marx, because they were fetishized as having lives of their own. What distinguishes this from new materialists who understand non-living objects as more-than-human actants? If Marxism was about bringing clarity to address the false consciousness of reification and commodity fetishism (is this an anti-Indigenous framing Marxists should take some effort to reframe? Puig de la Bellacasa doesn't explicitly ask this, but perhaps implies it), are new materialists back-pedalling? Also at issue for Newman is the way assemblages preclude “the means of production [having] any privileged role in social organization or the fashioning of hegemonic ideologies,” (p. 6).
I have remained fairly noncommittal when it comes to theory, but I do find certain forms of this theoretical strand interesting. One of Puig de la Bellacasa's examples here that troubles particular distinctions between living and non-living things is soil, and consequently there's some interesting agro-ecology stuff in this book. I think in similar terms about rivers, and marxists like Bikrum Gill and Nick Estes have written compelling work that argues in favour of the agency of rivers. In the case of Estes, rivers are relatives who provide forms of care for other more-than-human and human relatives. One figure, Puig de la Bellacasa mentions (who I want to read more of) is Natasha Myers, who my 4S panel organizers were also very fond of:
“This is another dimension of care traditionally neglected in the representation of things: its meaning of affectionate, sometimes loving, connection. A constant source of inspiration for the reintegration of affectivity in how we engage with technoscience and naturecultures has been for me the work of anthropologist of science Natasha Myers. I’m thinking on how she brings into the picture the bodily attachment of molecular biologists to their “objects.” Myers shows the crucial affective labor and care involved in “giving life” to molecule models (Myers 2015). What she exposes is that for these “things” to exist, active care and affection are required, not after they are out there as facts, but throughout a process of revealing them as co-generating. With attention to this specific experience of naturecultural relating, she alters the vision that scientists are dispassionately manipulating objects. Prolonging Evelyn Fox Keller’s famous phrasing—a feeling for the organism—Myers (2008, 165) notes that “they have a feel for the molecule.” These “renderings” of molecular science are all but a detached observation of the human-molecule gathering, far from a cartography of the existing actors and concerns. I have enjoyed seeing Myers presenting aspects of this work in academic contexts. A dancer as well as a scholar, she re-performed the gestures of embodied attachment by which the scientists she studied stage the virtual forms of their molecules. Her writing itself seems to navigate through embodied renderings of care. In a more recent strand of her research, focused on scientists and other practitioners investigating plant sentience, Myers encourages engaging in affective ecologies with plants in which care becomes a basic relational thread, transmitted by the love and passion exhibited by the observer of things, through her own bodily, immersed, involvement in cultivating affectivity. Through involved modes of know- ing and writing, Myers not only modifies our perception of the engagements of scientists and their matters, the plants, but she also invites us to become a researcher of a different type: “Here I invite you to cultivate your inner plant. This is not an exercise in anthropomorphism—a rendering of plants on the model of the human. Rather, it is an opportunity to vegetalize your already more than human body.” (p. 63)
This section on touch also reminded me of an old ethical claim made by Rousseau I think that suggested one’s ethical responsibility was correlated with one’s proximity to a situation or occurrence, which is problematized by the complex sorts of connections that exist in the 21st century:
“Yearnings for touch, for being in touch, are also at the heart of caring involvement. But there is no point in idealizing the possibilities. If touch extends, it is also because it is a reminder of finitude (why would infinite beings yearn for extension?)…There is no production of virtual relationality, whether commodified by capitalist investment or consumer society, that will not draw upon the life of some-body somewhere… Besides human labor, virtual technocultures always touch something somewhere—through demands for electric power generation and the proliferation of high-tech trash (Stephenson 1996; Basel Action Network 2002; Strand 2008).” (p. 108)
Finally, I want to finish with this good problematization of care that Michelle Murphy makes when discussing practices of ‘unsettling care’ that Puig de la Bellacasa mentions in her book:
“Michelle Murphy shows in her research on the women’s health movement, which many of us still cherish as a model of reappropriation of the means of reproduction, how projects driven by a notion of care can serve colonizing projects (Murphy 2015). Care can be instrumentalized at a global political level too. In a strong critique of humanitarian campaigns in migration contexts that enact “transnational regimes of care,” Miriam Ticktin shows how in the name of a universalist idea of relieving suffering—and what Tronto would have called paternalistic care—these actions are rather perpetuating inequalities and preventing collective change that could make a difference for migrant lives (Ticktin 2011).”
The book’s premise (if I can vulgarly reduce it to a simple question) is: if agency extends beyond humans, why should not ‘care’? That is, other organisms, forms of life, assemblages and “things” can be thought of as exhibiting care, and can challenge our notions of what it means to care. I think the book’s primary adversary here is a type of utilitarian environmentalist who speaks in the language of ‘natural resources’ and ‘ecosystem services’ — something I encountered as a grad student in environmental engineering, and found very irksome and annoying. That being said, Latour is not my favourite STS figure, and we cannot seem to escape his gravitational pull as a discipline. Though this book in many ways is a critique of Latour, it centres on the theoretical apparatuses he established. To illustrate his influence, Latour’s name is mentioned roughly ten times more than Marx. However, one interesting thing is it's Marxist feminists who Puig de la Bellacasa traces her interest in 'care' back to:
“Thus the book starts by engaging with discussions in science and technology studies (STS) that address the “more than human worlds” of sociotechnical assemblages and objects as lively politically charged “things.” These three chapters are marked by the context of my own encounter with the notion of care through feminist work that is not typically identified with discussions of care. Early Marxist-feminist materialist thinking from the late 1980s, often known as “standpoint feminist theory,” explored the possibility of a feminist epistemology and rooted the hopeful prospect of alternative ways of knowing in the materiality of women’s and other marginalized people’s everyday experiences.
…Care here is featured as a part of those labors that mediated with the material world, in particular domestic and family care labors, traditionally the realm, and existential confinement, of women, especially from underprivileged class and racial backgrounds. One particular text associated with such discussions marked me. Hand, Brain, and Heart: A Feminist Epistemology for the Natural Sciences, by the British feminist sociologist of science Hilary Rose, explored the political significance of caring to subvert the industrial-military-scientific complex (1983; 1994). She spoke of women’s movements such as the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp against nuclear weapons, which used symbols of care to create disruption, threading baby socks into wired fences, but also displaced women’s identity as caring mothers into a public sphere of direct action against nuclear weapons—and were sadly disqualified as bad mothers for leaving families behind to do so. Rose also spoke of aerospace workers who moved from participating in the manufacture of war technologies to designing socially beneficial technologies. Like others, Rose saw care as grounded in the material conditions of women’s reproductive labors, and she associated care with the working dimension of love, but the gist of her project was to bring the obligation of care as a way to contest the dominant ways of knowledge and science production in technoscience.”
Once you get through this genealogy, you arrive at the Latourian stuff, which discusses how technological artefacts like Boyle’s air pump (so marvellously treated by Shapin and Schaffer), have been mistakenly thought of as ‘objects’ rather than hybrid agents that make things happen:
“Coming back to We have never been modern, we can recall the refreshing immersion into the Middle Kingdom, a world of epistemologically puzzling yet ontologically robust hybrids—from global geopolitical entities such as the hole in the ozone layer to prelaboratory devices such as Robert Boyle’s legendary air pump. These, Latour argued, had been mistreated as “objects” by the philosophies pledged to the “Modern Constitution”—an arrangement of binary purifications that cuts through the complex human–nonhuman mediations that hybrids make happen (and that make hybrids happen) splitting apart their naturecultural, realconstructed, sosialscientific, discursivematerials modes of existence (Latour 1993). Another bad habit of the modern ethos, of the impulse to crack things open, is a gusto for purist dissection, coupled with the dismissive othering of those who do not dissect (e.g., fetishists or premoderns) and, eventually, with the reduction of the objectified part of the binary to the other (e.g., technology as object of humans, or vice versa). “Matter of fact” appeared as a poor epistemological category born to this modern tradition that reduces the rich recalcitrant reality of proliferating entities. But while modern thinking kept being utterly wrong about what makes the world go round, in the Middle Kingdom hybrids thrived nonchalant about misled philosophical binaries: the world of mediations is what always was—we had never been (really) modern.”
And Puig de la Bellacasa then goes on to explain how we get from ‘matters of fact’ through to ‘matters of concern’ and then ‘matters of care’:
“Part of this approach involves that “when agencies are introduced, they are never presented simply as matters of fact, but always as matters of concern, with their mode of fabrication and their stabilizing mechanisms clearly visible” (Latour 2004b, 246, emphasis added). MoC provided a new conceptual tool for this well-explored task: the restaging of things as lively. This aesthetics helps us to resist to what Alfred North Whitehead called the “bifurcation of nature,” which splits feelings, meanings, and the like, from the hardcore facts”
Whitehead generated an entire body of theological theorizing known as "process theology" that I know many Marxist liberation theologians are mildly allergic to, but many process theologians like liberation theologians. One queer friend I have who's at Emmanuel College at UofT, says the two main camps in seminary are the process theology people and the Barthian Calvinists, both of which they feel no affinity for. Anyway, back from this diversion, and a bit more on Whitehead's influence here:
“…thought together with other meanings aimed at naming the “many” that makes a “thing”—such as “society” (inspired by Gabriel Tarde’s sociology and again Whitehead’s metaphysics), a “collective,” an “assembly,” or an “association.” Thus here its renaming as “thing” aims to convey a more lively perception, understanding and restaging, of the misnamed objectified matter of fact: aesthetics is politics… To be able to think things as such, Latour argues for a new sense of “empirical philosophy” diverging from “flat” empiricist epistemology, one that would place us in the flow of this moving experience. Instead of bridging worlds, we can “drift” in what Whitehead called the “passage of nature” (a more poetic view of Latour’s Middle Kingdom), in the dense troubled waters of “what is given into experience” (Latour 2005d, 4)”
This theorization is within an intellectual lineage that many have come to associate, almost wholesale, with the entirety of STS, and is a theoretical commitment that a number of Marxists have been very dissatisfied with. For instance, Stuart Newman (in a 2022 paper on new materialism in the journal Marxism & Sciences) finds the “flat ontology” of assemblages, and new materialism more broadly, as unsatisfying theoretical frameworks, because for him, they “demote the specificity of life and its living matter” by refusing to allow for strong enough distinctions between forms of life and and non-living entities. More generally Newman believes anti-essentialism, while productive in some contexts such as gender, “cannot serve as a consistent scientific program.” One tension here lies between reification on the one hand, and more-than-human agency on the other. We see Ahmed frame emotional “affects” as taking on a life of their own in the same way commodities did for Marx, because they were fetishized as having lives of their own. What distinguishes this from new materialists who understand non-living objects as more-than-human actants? If Marxism was about bringing clarity to address the false consciousness of reification and commodity fetishism (is this an anti-Indigenous framing Marxists should take some effort to reframe? Puig de la Bellacasa doesn't explicitly ask this, but perhaps implies it), are new materialists back-pedalling? Also at issue for Newman is the way assemblages preclude “the means of production [having] any privileged role in social organization or the fashioning of hegemonic ideologies,” (p. 6).
I have remained fairly noncommittal when it comes to theory, but I do find certain forms of this theoretical strand interesting. One of Puig de la Bellacasa's examples here that troubles particular distinctions between living and non-living things is soil, and consequently there's some interesting agro-ecology stuff in this book. I think in similar terms about rivers, and marxists like Bikrum Gill and Nick Estes have written compelling work that argues in favour of the agency of rivers. In the case of Estes, rivers are relatives who provide forms of care for other more-than-human and human relatives. One figure, Puig de la Bellacasa mentions (who I want to read more of) is Natasha Myers, who my 4S panel organizers were also very fond of:
“This is another dimension of care traditionally neglected in the representation of things: its meaning of affectionate, sometimes loving, connection. A constant source of inspiration for the reintegration of affectivity in how we engage with technoscience and naturecultures has been for me the work of anthropologist of science Natasha Myers. I’m thinking on how she brings into the picture the bodily attachment of molecular biologists to their “objects.” Myers shows the crucial affective labor and care involved in “giving life” to molecule models (Myers 2015). What she exposes is that for these “things” to exist, active care and affection are required, not after they are out there as facts, but throughout a process of revealing them as co-generating. With attention to this specific experience of naturecultural relating, she alters the vision that scientists are dispassionately manipulating objects. Prolonging Evelyn Fox Keller’s famous phrasing—a feeling for the organism—Myers (2008, 165) notes that “they have a feel for the molecule.” These “renderings” of molecular science are all but a detached observation of the human-molecule gathering, far from a cartography of the existing actors and concerns. I have enjoyed seeing Myers presenting aspects of this work in academic contexts. A dancer as well as a scholar, she re-performed the gestures of embodied attachment by which the scientists she studied stage the virtual forms of their molecules. Her writing itself seems to navigate through embodied renderings of care. In a more recent strand of her research, focused on scientists and other practitioners investigating plant sentience, Myers encourages engaging in affective ecologies with plants in which care becomes a basic relational thread, transmitted by the love and passion exhibited by the observer of things, through her own bodily, immersed, involvement in cultivating affectivity. Through involved modes of know- ing and writing, Myers not only modifies our perception of the engagements of scientists and their matters, the plants, but she also invites us to become a researcher of a different type: “Here I invite you to cultivate your inner plant. This is not an exercise in anthropomorphism—a rendering of plants on the model of the human. Rather, it is an opportunity to vegetalize your already more than human body.” (p. 63)
This section on touch also reminded me of an old ethical claim made by Rousseau I think that suggested one’s ethical responsibility was correlated with one’s proximity to a situation or occurrence, which is problematized by the complex sorts of connections that exist in the 21st century:
“Yearnings for touch, for being in touch, are also at the heart of caring involvement. But there is no point in idealizing the possibilities. If touch extends, it is also because it is a reminder of finitude (why would infinite beings yearn for extension?)…There is no production of virtual relationality, whether commodified by capitalist investment or consumer society, that will not draw upon the life of some-body somewhere… Besides human labor, virtual technocultures always touch something somewhere—through demands for electric power generation and the proliferation of high-tech trash (Stephenson 1996; Basel Action Network 2002; Strand 2008).” (p. 108)
Finally, I want to finish with this good problematization of care that Michelle Murphy makes when discussing practices of ‘unsettling care’ that Puig de la Bellacasa mentions in her book:
“Michelle Murphy shows in her research on the women’s health movement, which many of us still cherish as a model of reappropriation of the means of reproduction, how projects driven by a notion of care can serve colonizing projects (Murphy 2015). Care can be instrumentalized at a global political level too. In a strong critique of humanitarian campaigns in migration contexts that enact “transnational regimes of care,” Miriam Ticktin shows how in the name of a universalist idea of relieving suffering—and what Tronto would have called paternalistic care—these actions are rather perpetuating inequalities and preventing collective change that could make a difference for migrant lives (Ticktin 2011).”
August 10, 2023
i tell everyone that this book is horrible to read but they must do it. incredibly difficult to read, highly theoretical. when i pushed through the wording the themes that were hidden beneath were interesting and explored what care means within different positions of agency - i found this of most of interest next to joanna hedva essay. it’s given me so many resources, this text is evidently very knowledgeable and there’s much to be unpicked in almost every chapter however the i do lose interest in places focused on ai. i would’ve loved to read something written more accessibly i’m sure theres more i could take out of this text if i was able to unscramble it. i’m sure i’ll revisit this text throughout my career but for now deciphering it makes my head hurt.
January 4, 2022
Care is a broad subject, and not easy to pin down to one idea. María Puig de la Bellacasa approaches it from a study of ethics and philosophy. The first section sets out the possibilities for care across different types of human and more-than-human actors, including inorganic technologies. It is dense reading, and not easy to recommend for that reason, but it is also carefully written, with each word chosen for its accuracy and no term used lightly.
The second half of the book presents a possible real-world praxis for the theoretical framework in the first. Puig de la Bellacasa uses her own experiences learning from a permaculture retreat to begin an argument about how care of soil is a critical and central example of a system that requires care. Drawing from science, philosophy, experience and culture, she uses soil to show how complex webs of interconnected actors need to care for one another to maintain healthy soil for present and future generations.
The theoretical framework in this book is one that anyone with an interest in networks and assemblages would find fascinating.
The second half of the book presents a possible real-world praxis for the theoretical framework in the first. Puig de la Bellacasa uses her own experiences learning from a permaculture retreat to begin an argument about how care of soil is a critical and central example of a system that requires care. Drawing from science, philosophy, experience and culture, she uses soil to show how complex webs of interconnected actors need to care for one another to maintain healthy soil for present and future generations.
The theoretical framework in this book is one that anyone with an interest in networks and assemblages would find fascinating.
December 18, 2023
Five stars for the friction this book creates, how it continuously forced me to pause and think - not per se about the matter of the book, but of my own projects - and how it bravely attempted multiple conceptual connections. As someone working in philosophy of technology, I didn't need to be convinced of the major part of the book - connecting care and ethics to material settings, something that philosophers of technology did as early as 1970s (e.g. Don Ihde) and continue to do so (e.g. Aimee van Wynsberghe or Madelaine Lay). In fact, this omission to cover the state of the art kept really bothering me, although of course I understand that one cannot cover everything. But this omission, while covering the material moves of Latour and Barad, did weaken the overall message for this biased reader. Where the book shines is in expanding the more than human relations explicitly to the earth, the ecological world around us. Although that move remained rather speculative and in spirit, it in principle opened the doors to further work in this direction and proposed the care lens and speculative approaches as plausible candidates to accomplish it. The book inspires and challenges, I recommend reading it, especially to those in STS and phil tech communities.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 27, 2024
I find something very appealing about the central observation in this book, that normative ethics should be grounded in awareness and engagement with the various entanglements we have with other humans and non-humans. What is right and wrong is not reducible to the individual. Instead it emerges out of engagement with and attention to our relational connections to other humans and non-humans. Those relationships are "caring" relationships, which can be understood as care in the sense of "tending to" but also care as in "matters to." Unless we look outside of the individual as the focal point of ethics, we will not see how these relational care networks are central to determining ethical action in uncertain situations.
The writing was a bit abstruse, unnecessarily so. I’d have liked to see the author take up care in its more conventional applications as well because they are related and could have helped bridged the gulf of understanding to the more specialized use of caring as adapted to this argument.
The writing was a bit abstruse, unnecessarily so. I’d have liked to see the author take up care in its more conventional applications as well because they are related and could have helped bridged the gulf of understanding to the more specialized use of caring as adapted to this argument.
September 6, 2025
I like that the author dares to reclaim “care” to be a more-than-human matter. Because it is such a bold claim that it needs to be speculative. The main idea is that all different species care for each other and care for humans through web of relationships such as the food web and that this ethic can disrupt human dominance and guide us to also maintain and sustain our relationships with others to live as well as possible together. However, this amazing idea is communicated through dense citations, scholarly nuances and philosophical debates rather than vivid and concrete everyday examples of care. It might be difficult to read, and too theoretical for someone who just wants to learn more about more-than-human care and be able to relate to the new notion.
March 4, 2024
It is hard to say easily what this directly contributes, a weaving and complication of many thinkers - Latour, Haraway, Tronto, Stengers - on care's challenges, on critique and trust-building - dissent from within - for avoiding objectification and maintenance of obligations to more than just our tribe, to more than just human relationships. Roves slowly from STS to permaculture and soil ecological timescales, full of considered light shoves and repositionings of our language and thinking.
December 24, 2021
Per fi finito! Molt complicat si t’endinses per primera vegada en temes d’ètica, biologia, filosofia i ecofeminisme. Molt recomanable pels amants de la tecnociència, la permacultura i l’ecofeminisme, tot i que fa servir un llenguatge molt tècnic i difícil d’entendre.
December 24, 2025
Really pushing at the limits of what I can understand, especially in the middle chapters. Things get clearer towards the end when she talks about soil. I like some of the theoretical points she makes but there are fairly long stretches when she loses me.
February 18, 2021
Fresh perspectives on the gendered role of caregiving and a lovely chapter on soil, which surprised me on how much I enjoyed.
July 21, 2023
couldn’t get through a chapter…the concepts seem interesting but i feel like the author could’ve written them in a muuuuch more accessible and engaging way.
September 25, 2024
Read this for class
July 3, 2025
Post lesfem book club discussion: I cannot in good faith recommend this book as the text is so ridiculously dense that even after the discussion I felt like I only understood it marginally better. I think that the themes of the book and this Marxist-feminist analysis of care is insightful, especially in regards to care of the earth, and I appreciated that it challenged a lot of the views I held prior to reading about ecological care. However, I think there are much better-written books out there on care, such as Alva Gotby's They Call It Love. Overall, 2.5/5 stars.
Holding off on assigning an actual review until after we discuss this book in lesbian feminist book club (which you should join unless you're a man). My initial thoughts are that it was too dense and philosophical, especially in the first part, for me to adequately grasp the concepts Puig de la Bellacasa is discussing.
Holding off on assigning an actual review until after we discuss this book in lesbian feminist book club (which you should join unless you're a man). My initial thoughts are that it was too dense and philosophical, especially in the first part, for me to adequately grasp the concepts Puig de la Bellacasa is discussing.
June 26, 2023
Excellent, a must read.
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