Spaces of Care

Care is one of the foremost issues of our age. Focusing on legal, criminological and social anthropological perspectives, this edited collection makes a valuable contribution to the literature in this area and brings together leading international scholars to discern and articulate what we may consider to be a useful analytic of care.

The collection examines the ways in which the emerging interdisciplinary study of care provokes a reassessment of the connections and disjuncture between care and governance, ethics, and public, personal and professional identities. Evolving from a project coordinated by the Cambridge Socio-Legal Group, Spaces of Care brings together leading international scholars to articulate what we may consider to be a useful analytic of care. Lawyers, anthropologists, sociologists and criminologists reflect on specific aspects of conceptualising caring relations in ‘spaces’. These spaces include: communities of care and abandonment; self-care and kinship care; spaces as ‘gaps’ in care; the meanings of marketised care; and the ways in which care is constructed and constrained in different ways in venues such as homes, prisons, workplaces and virtual spaces. Common themes include temporality (historical specificity) and the dynamics of care across time and place; subjectivity (including different experiences of care); the economies of care (including the commodification of care; public and private manifestations of care; privatised ‘care’); disruptions of care (which generate vulnerabilities with regard to continuities of care); eligibility (those deemed to be deserving and undeserving of care); relationalities of care (collective and individual agency in caring relations, kinship care), and technologies and imaginaries of care (as in new notions of care forged by those in online virtual worlds such as Second Life).