Matters of Care (Posthumanities)

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.  

• Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Experimental Futures)
• Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene
• The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
• A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Forerunners: Ideas First)
• Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times
• Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime
• Necropolitics (Theory in Forms)
• Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century)
• Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)
• Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning