Up to this point we have argued that care is a motivator for research, and we have suggested that different participants in the research process are likely to care about the topic in different ways and be differently positioned in relation to it. We have argued that generating knowledge is a relational process and that the emotional dimensions of doing research are not a messy distraction, but the source of important understandings. But we have rather skirted around what we mean by ‘care-full research’ in practice. In this chapter we discuss what doing research with care means in terms of the design, conduct and use of research. We link the stages of research with the phases of care articulated by Tronto (1993) in her book Moral Boundaries and developed in her later work (2013).

To introduce this discussion, we offer an example that comes from a world that is much less familiar to us than many of the examples we have drawn on from our own experiences as researchers. As we were discussing this book and talked of the need to go beyond the human in our consideration of doing research with care in a world in which the damage done to the biosphere and the physical environment by humans has become all too obvious, we were unsure what this might mean for the type of participatory research practice that we are advocating. Our advocacy of co-production is based on our experience of researching in a health and social care context in which research has become one strategy for pursuing social justice. We felt reasonably confident about proposing what careful participatory research means in these contexts. But is it possible to imagine research practices in which different species as well as different humans might care about an issue and collaborate and research together with care for their collective benefit? We found one answer in Donna Haraway’s (2016) story of the PigeonBlog.

The ‘matter of concern’ that prompted this story was air pollution and how this might be measured and communicated to the people affected by it. This is a matter of concern not only to humans but also to the animals and plants who also have to breathe and try to live within polluted air.