Spaces of Care

Loraine Gelsthorpe, Perveez Mody, Brian Sloan, Loraine Gelsthorpe, Perveez Mody, Brian Sloan

• Publisher: Hart Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509929641
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Family Law
• Index: Law

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).

1

Introduction

Spaces of Care: Concepts, Configurations, and Challenges

LORAINE GELSTHORPE, PERVEEZ MODY AND BRIAN SLOAN

I.Origins and Aims of the Project

This edited collection of essays emerges from a project on space and care, drawing on different legal, criminological and social anthropological perspectives and particularly on a symposium held in Cambridge in April 2018. The aim of the collection is not to provide a general overview of the now extensive and fertile literature on care, but rather to interrogate the ways in which the emerging interdisciplinary study of care challenges and provokes a reassessment of the points of connection and disjuncture between contexts, meanings and acts of care and the wide variety of spaces and locales in which they emerge. It also emerges from a concern with understanding the ethics of care, and the multiple (and diverse) public, personal and professional enactments of care that emerge through a critical engagement with the spaces in which we study care. The symposium brought leading international scholars together to discern and articulate what we may consider to be a useful analytic of care. Lawyers, anthropologists, sociologists and criminologists reflected on varying socio-legal aspects of conceptualising caring relations in ‘spaces’, including regimes of care and abandonment (Khlinovskaya Rockhill; Borneman), self-care and kinship care (Carr, Kirton-Darling and Salcedo Repolês; Mody), spaces as ‘gaps’ in care (Burri), the meanings of marketised care (Sloan; Dominey and Gelsthorpe), and the ways in which care is imagined, made, constrained and engendered in different ways in places such as homes, prisons, workplaces and virtual worlds (Gelsthorpe and Canton; Boellstorff). The symposium allowed the exploration of the complex and varied cultural registers and spaces in which care is being transformed (such as practices of kinship and mobility, migration, law, new regimes of bureaucracy and governance) with important theoretical consequences for how we understand and evaluate what counts as ‘care’ and what constitutes its abdication.

The original idea for this project, however, emerged in 2008 as an outcome of an interdisciplinary undergraduate course in Social Anthropology & Sociology at the University of Cambridge, which was designed to address new developments within the social sciences on the subject of care. Four members of the Cambridge Socio-Legal Group with different disciplinary backgrounds (Anthropology, Criminology, Law and Sociology) came together to teach on the course (Mody on kinship practices of care, Gelsthorpe on women in prisons, Joanna Miles on family law and care, Darin Weinberg on learning disability and care); the paper was conceived and run by a member (Mody) and it encouraged the start of some important conversations about the conceptual and disciplinary points of departure and connection for our teaching of ‘care’. Over the intervening years, what has become increasingly obvious is how productive the interdisciplinary methods and insights have been to the study of care and how this has continued to inform its study in a wide range of academic contexts in subjects as diverse as Law, Medicine, Social Anthropology, Sociology, Politics and Philosophy, amongst other fields. We offer this volume as a further contribution to that engagement.

The two-day symposium associated with the Spaces of Care project took place at Pembroke College, Cambridge. All papers were presented, and the authors pre-circulated drafts. A number of discussants from various disciplines were invited to respond to the papers (Patrick McKearney, Jo Cook, Barbara Bodenhorn, Megha Amrith, Sam Cole, and Alice Ievins), and the discussion was lively and fruitful. In the final session of the workshop, participants reflected on themes that emerged from the event, including temporality, subjectivity, economy, ‘imaginaries’, relationality and the ‘dark side’ of care (Fine 2007). These themes guide the connections that we make through this book, and are further considered in section III of this introduction below.

II.Setting this Book in the Context of Existing Literature

It would of course be impossible even to summarise the vast body of existing scholarship on care. Here, we therefore highlight literature that has particularly helped to frame and/or distinguish the approach that we take in this book.

Notable amongst previous research in relation to this book is ReValuing Care in Theory, Law and Policy: Cycles and Connections edited by Harding, Fletcher and Beasley (2017). Collectively, the authors seek to explore the different dimensions of care that shape social, legal and political contexts. They address these dimensions in four key ways. First, the contributors expand contemporary theoretical understandings of the value of care, by reflecting upon established conceptual approaches (such as the ‘ethics of care’) and developing new ways of using and understanding this concept. Second, the contributors draw on a wide range of methods, from doctrinal scholarship through ethnographic, empirical and biographical research methodologies. Third, the book enlarges the usual subjects of care research, by expanding its analysis beyond the more typical focus on familial interconnection to include professional care contexts, care by strangers and care for and about animals. Finally, the collection draws on contributions from academics working in Europe and Australia, across law, anthropology, gender studies, politics, psychology and sociology. Harding, Fletcher and Beasley’s book has informed some of the thinking underpinning this edited collection. Like ours, ReValuing Care is an international as well as interdisciplinary collection and provides helpful support as an intellectual interlocutor for our joint endeavours.

A special issue of Social Studies of Science (2015) acknowledges the slippery nature of the concept of care. As the introduction to the issue indicates (Martin, Myers and Viseau 2015: 625–26):

Any attempt to define it will be exceeded by its multivocality in everyday and scholarly use. In its enactment, care is both necessary to the fabric of biological and social existence and notorious for the problems that it raises when it is defined, legislated, measured, and evaluated. What care looks and feels like is both context-specific and perspective-dependent. Yet, this elusiveness does not mean that it lacks importance. In our engagements with the worlds that we study, construct, and inhabit, we cannot but care: care is an essential part of being a researcher and a citizen.

Again, this relates strongly to our project, and has informed our thinking about the fluidity and unsettled quality of the concept of care (Cook and Trundle, forthcoming).

Other interdisciplinary texts and articles have focused on single elements of care, particularly in primary and secondary health care settings. For example, Deborah Swingleton edited a collection of papers in the British Medical Education Journal on ‘The Many Meanings of “Quality” in Healthcare: Interdisciplinary Perspectives’ (2015). Ayse Gurgess and Yan Xiao (2006) carried out a systematic review of the literature on design information technology in care settings, particularly relating to multi-disciplinary rounds in hospital wards. Sociologies of care have similarly tended to focus on health care. One example is Dead on Arrival: The Politics of Health-Care in Twentieth Century America by Colin Gordon (2003).

Political conceptions of care include: Intimate Labours: cultures, technologies and the politics of care edited by Eileen Boris (2010) – a book which focuses on those around the world who make their living from offering ‘personal care’ in one form or another. A new wave of books and articles about care focus on ecological care for the environment: Beyond Mothering Earth: Ecological Citizenship and the Politics of Care by Sherlyn Macgregor (2006) and ‘Local and green, global and fair: the ethical foodscape and the politics of care’ by Kevin Morgan (2010). Our collection may touch on such matters, but its focus is considerably broader.

Very recent texts on dimensions of ‘care’ include Stories of Care: A Labour of Law by LJB Hayes (2017). This is an interdisciplinary study of the interactions of law and labour that shape paid care work. Based on the experiences of homecare workers, this highly topical text unpicks doctrinal assumptions about class and gender to interrogate contemporary labour law. It demonstrates how the UK’s crisis in social care is connected to the gendered inadequacy of labour law and argues for transformative change to law at work. The book is fascinating and compelling, but the focus on individual experiences is at some distance from our collection of essays. A related book is Obligation and Commitment in Family Law by Gillian Douglas (2018). She takes a contextual approach (drawing on history, sociology and social policy) to examine the concept of obligation as developed in family law and the difficulties the law has had in translating it from a theoretical and ideological concept into the basis of enforceable actions and duties. Thus the book has been of interest to us, but it focuses on a much narrower concept of care than was unfurled during our symposium. The same can be said for Bottomley and Wong’s (2009) edited collection of essays: Changing Contours of Domestic Life, Family And Law: Caring And Sharing, which broadly offers a reflection on the changing contours of what is generally thought of as ‘domestic relations’ and on the impact which legal recognition carries in making visible some relationships rather than others. The book also explores the potential for normative values encapsulated within patterns of legal recognition and regulation and the intersections between private law and public policy; the role of private law in the allocation of responsibility and privilege; and the differential impact of seemingly progressive policies on economically vulnerable or socially marginal groupings. Further, the editors examine tensions between family law models and models carried within other fields of private law; and, unusually, architectures in law and the built environment designed to facilitate broader accounts of domestic relationships.

In our deliberations, we have found particularly interesting ideas of ‘carescapes’ in regard to the environment and planning (Milligan and Wiles 2010; Bowlby 2012; Ivanova et al 2016). Equally, applying feminist ethics to topics such as well-being, social justice, and the ways we relate to one another and the places in which we live, this volume has been enriched by Barnes’ (2012) examination of the public debate on care in social policy. The role of the voluntary sector in regard to care (Milligan 2001; Ticktin 2011) and the ethics of care in everyday practice (Barnes 2012) have provided helpful reminders of the need to restore care as a fundamental value in private lives and public policy, and encourages us not to assume the virtue of any regimes of care without interrogating its politics and sources of moral legitimacy. Our intention in this book is to focus particularly on the ambiguities and fluidities of care as conceived and practised. We have sought to offer here a distinctive contribution to multi-locational conceptions of care; considering ‘care’ beyond those areas and debates most often associated with caring (such as health care, family care, caring for elderly people, for disabled people and other vulnerable populations, as well as care of the body and carescapes). In so doing, we argue that care and caring are deeply ambiguous, fluid and inter-subjective, and that wherever we study care we are inevitably confronted with this changeability and its potential to be transformed through acts of resistance, reinterpretation and reimagination.

III.Organising Principles and Emerging Themes

‘Care’ is one of the foremost issues of our age and ‘spaces of care’ is our organising theme. Our approach is to consider ‘care’ as fundamentally contingent, and as a way of building capacities, imaginaries and relationships. The contingency of care makes us alert to the open-endedness of caring relationships such that we cannot easily detect the agencies of those involved, bringing to mind the disruptive potential of care. In addition to contingency, we argue that care is often reciprocal (even multi-directional) and that it serves as a technology with the potential to assist, maintain, transform, harm and disrupt (for instance, maintaining good documentation can be a technology of care). In this sense, care is a form of social reproduction with the potential to also reproduce inequality and oppression. Canton and Dominey (Chapter two this volume) draw our attention to the way in which punishment invites people who have offended to change, and the authors reflect on the process of bringing about change, causing them to question whether punishment shares the reciprocal characteristics of care, and whether the anticipated desire to bring about change (in those who are incarcerated) transforms the nature of the punishment/caring relationship.

However, this recognition of the potential relationality of care (see, in particular, Herring’s contribution – Chapter nine) does not allow us to predict its outcomes. On the contrary, numerous contributors to this volume argue for the need to mobilise care as a strategy and a form of imagination, allowing us to better apprehend the creative and potentially disruptive aspects of care. In this vein, care is a constitutive element in the meaning-making of place (such as the gae in Reece’s work in Botswana (Chapter eleven), cities as spaces of care in Carr, Kirton-Darling and Salcedo Repolês’ chapter (Chapter six), and Ethnographia Island in Boellstorff’s account of Second Life (Chapter thirteen)). While a more simplistic understanding of ‘space’ and ‘care’ might focus only on the physical and geographical aspects of ‘care’, we have deliberately adopted a broad understanding of ‘space’ to encompass its conceptual nature whilst also capturing the making and un-making of care in actual places.

The themes which cut across the chapters and characterise this volume (many of which emerged during our symposium discussions) include: contingency and temporality (historical specificity) and the dynamics of care across time, place and generations; subjectivity and inter-subjectivity – are intentions of care experienced in that way and how is care reciprocally experienced, and what does care feel like?; 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.

The book also attends to flows of care, asking whether care is better thought of as sitting on a spectrum of relationality rather than being defined as absent or present, ‘good’ or ‘bad’? Are there communities of care and who defines and recognises these (recipients or givers of care; individuals or states)? Are there tensions between policy designed to define ‘care’ and everyday practices of care? Does care necessitate reciprocity? Is reciprocity difficult? What are the materialities of care? What is the relation between formal and informal dimensions of care and public and private economies of provision?

Another set of themes relate to the ‘dark side’ of care (lived realities), with paradoxes of care coming to the fore, as well as harm done in the name of ‘care’; this also relates to the rhetoric and reality of care and to the apparent ineptitude of organisations in delivering care in some instances; euphemisms of care; care as a human condition; what does ‘good enough’ care look like?; and the ‘scales of care’ and whether organisations as well as individuals can ‘care’, are also relevant to organisational culture and continuities of care.

The unifying argument here is that care transforms the relational sphere and confounds distinctions between the apparently ‘public’ and ‘private’, ‘personal’ and ‘professional’. The authors in this volume are all engaged in the task of interpreting how people understand the professional or personal obligations of caring and in so doing, drawing lines between these categories almost to reconfigure them, whilst allowing us to engage with and discern their notions of care. These practices of demarcation and re-signification are often sneakily transgressive of dominant cultural models of care, and reveal the importance of imagination and contingency that shapes and transforms the care we study.

IV.Structure and Contents of the Book

We end this introductory chapter with an overview of the contents of the book’s chapters. Chapters two, three and four form a trilogy which revolves around concepts and experiences of care in the criminal justice system, traditionally conceived of as a space in which ‘hard’ or ‘unpleasant’ things happen in the form of punishment. In Chapter two, ‘Punishment and care reappraised’, Rob Canton and Jane Dominey examine the variable and uncertain place that ‘care’ has had in the discourse, policies and practices of punishment. Punishment by the state has been called ‘the inflicting of pain, intended as pain’ (Christie 1981: i) and almost all definitions of punishment insist that it must involve the imposition of some form of ‘hard treatment’. All of this seems starkly opposed to care. Yet probation, responsible for giving effect to many non-custodial punishments, has sometimes been listed among ‘the caring professions’ and closely aligned with the values of social work; at other times it has had to contend with political proposals that it should be punishment and to distance itself from any traditions of caring. In particular, probation has long been preoccupied with the question of whether it is (or should) ‘care or control’ or whether it could do both – debates that, oddly, have largely taken place without reference to the reported experiences of service users. Again, prison is not usually regarded as a place of care, but sometimes prisoners say that they do feel that some staff care about (and even for) them, while many prison staff take caring to be part of their work. The relatively few attempts that have been made to apply an ‘ethics of care’ approach to questions of punishment have tended to make a case for restorative justice. This paper argues that care is compatible with – and indeed entailed by – almost all legitimate penal objectives. Being cared about is a precondition of caring for others and this is already sufficient to place it at the centre of any attempt to bring it about such that fewer crimes come to be committed. It concludes (following Coverdale 2017) that caring responses to crimes have indeed many beneficial consequences, but that care is of intrinsic value and a moral entitlement of all people.

Chapter three focuses on ‘Who cares? Probation practice and the private sector’. Here, Jane Dominey and Loraine Gelsthorpe outline some of the tensions between public and private provision in relation to support for offenders post-release from prison and supervised in the community, or supervised under Community Orders in the community. Supporters of privatisation have argued that a mixed market of supply in relation to services for offenders brings efficiencies and innovations beyond the usual scope and capacity of the public sector. The authors suggest that car...