Introduction

This chapter considers a politics of care, firstly via a discussion of care ethics and conceptualisations of care in broad terms, before moving on to consider care and transformations of the welfare state and economy, including in relation to gender roles and processes of austerity. Care is an everyday and ongoing set of practices and relationship. In this book, the forms of care at stake include caring for children (especially as a mother), care for neighbours, care for older people and those with disabilities, ‘young carers’ supporting their parents, forms of community care, especially among migrant families newly arrived in the UK, and notions of ‘self-care’ and nurturing. All these forms of care involve vulnerabilities, needs and dependencies. However these forms and practices of care are not individual relational matters but in themselves caught up in wider structures and institutions that may be caring or uncaring. Forms of care may be sustained in the most hostile and uncaring environments. As such, a politics of care, as Joan Tronto (2015: 4) writes, must ‘start in the middle of things. Care practices don't suddenly begin, they are already ongoing’. Within this book, the research projects discussed did not initially have a focus on care, rather I came to see that care practices and politics were crucial both for the actions of local activists, and the wider economic and political structures that framed these actions.

How, then, to approach this diffuse and everyday terrain? Theorising care has been a key concern for feminist scholars over decades. A starting point for recent discussions of care has often been Fisher and Tronto's 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’ (1990: 40). As can be seen from this definition, feminist analysis since the 1980s has been concerned to define care in expansive and wide ranging ways, that place it at the centre of how society, politics and ethics are conceptualised (for example Noddings, 1984; Gilligan, 1993; Held, 1995), recognising that it has often been excluded and marginalised.

These approaches therefore represent a challenge to dominant understandings of care as a banal, everyday and practical matter, undertaken within a largely ‘invisible’ private sphere.