Towards Critical Socioecologies of Care
This dossier on care comprises a series of short posts from speakers at our Roundtable on Care, co-badged with the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships (CRFR) and convened during the visit we hosted for members of UGEN.
By Dr. Sarah Parry
My engagement with care starts from the context of thinking about the intertwined social and environmental crises that we're now facing and thinking about care as an alternative set of ideas for addressing and engaging with our entangled socioecological problems. We must not only minimise the damage that's already underway but also think about how we can enable a multispecies flourishing into the future. In this context, my own work considers how expanding caring relations can be and should be a priority for us when addressing current socioecological challenges.
Within the social sciences and humanities already, there's an elaborate and well thought out engagement with care in other domains. But in relation to environmental care, we are only just beginning to explore the implications of an ethics of care. We're also seeing many organisations adopting the language of environmental care, and not surprisingly, they mean many different things, and it is being used to cover a range of practices, a range of doings. As social scientists, we offer valuable insights and expertise for engaging with intertwined social and environmental care and to help shepherd it as a potential way of rethinking our problems and associated solutions.
A helpful starting point is Berenice Fisher and Joan Tronto (1990: 40) definition of care as ‘… everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all that we seek to interweave in a complex, life sustaining web.’ Here, care ethics starts with ‘a different voice’, as Carol Gilligan coined it in 1982, that is grounded in an ontology of relationality and interdependence. And this is the key starting point. It takes seriously our entanglements with non-human life, thereby shifting us away from notions of human exceptionalism. Through this approach, we begin with from the premise that we all have the capacity to care, but this is structured by socioeconomic context. In relation to environmental challenges an ethics of care shifts our conception of nature from one of abstraction and separation to one that steers us towards the concrete – to the everyday experience and commonality between all living things. This enables us to think about care as not only interhuman, but also interspecies and intergenerational too. And so, thinking about care as a long-term endeavour and its ongoing-ness as something that has to be continually made and remade.
In thinking with care for addressing environmental challenges then, it elevates the importance of emotions and relational understandings which have become marginal considerations relative to economic and technical considerations, such as measuring carbon and energy usage. And it insists on this entanglement, not separating humans from the planetary problems. It is in this context that it seems to me that we need to build a new lexicon for care, for socioenvironmental care. And in doing so I think that we should how we might capture its ongoing-ness – to capture care not as a static thing but as a process, something that we have to continually be working on.
Others have called for care to be developed into a political vocabulary in order to transform policy agendas. But what this means in relation to our current socioecological challenges, as I say, is something that we still need to develop. I think a care centred framing draws attention to the context in which care is and isn't enacted. It draws attention to inequalities within caring relations and to responsibilities, to the resourcing of caring practices. And also, therefore, the democratic challenge that arises from this when we're thinking about expanding environmental care. So, this matters for sustainability issues too. We need to ensure that care is not only de-feminised, but also de-privatised. And these same logics that we've seen happening in relation to human-to-human care are also present when it comes to environmental care.
Researching socioecological care as an ethical and political concern steers us away from the identity politics of socioecological care as feminine and feminised, while retaining attention to a critical engagement with the distribution of care: who is doing the care, what is included and what is currently neglected. I'm interested in research that works with, in and for communities that are in already enacting socioecological care – however imperfect and partial this might be. As an engaged social scientist, it is important that we ask how an ethics of care can support current and future actions in and for wider communities while simultaneously shepherding its uptake. In doing so, we can play an active role in reframing public and policy agendas addressing environment and sustainability.
Author Bio
Dr. Parry's recent research interests have focussed on relations between gender, environment and sustainability in affluent countries. She has been writing about the gender-sustainability-household nexus, particularly through the concepts of work and care. Recently published work can be found in the journals of Environment and Planning E: Nature & Space, The Sociological Review, The Journal of Familes, Relationships & Societies, and forthcoming in a Handbook for Research on Sustainable Lifestyles. Extending these interests, she is developing writing and research on care - as an ethical and political concern - as offering new agendas for understanding and responding to our socioecological crises.