Unthinking care

ABSTRACT

Within and beyond the field of communication, invocations of “care” are rising. In this brief essay, I complicate how scholars of communication relate to care as a feeling, practice, ethics, and politics in two ways. First, I uncover several complexities inherent to care – care’s partiality, relation to neglect, and frequent entanglement with violence/harm. Second, I suggest that scholars of communication should bring our distinctive theoretical and methodological insights to bear on the questions about care. Rather than treating care as an unquestioned good, I propose instead that we embrace care’s messiness. Doing so, however, may require that we unthink care.

KEYWORDS:

• Care
• ethics of care
• rhetoric
• ethics

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Eric King Watts for the invitation to muse and speculate about the future of communication and critical/cultural studies and for his engagement with this essay throughout its composition.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Though Butler conceptualizes grievability across a range of texts, see especially Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London, UK: Verso, 2004); Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London, UK: Verso, 2009).

2 Joshua Trey Barnett, Mourning in the Anthropocene: Ecological Grief and Earthly Coexistence (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2022), 139.

3 Ibid., 145.

4 See Phaedra C. Pezzullo, “Environment,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, ed. Jon F. Nussbaum (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017), 9–11.

5 Cox laid out his reasons for classifying environmental communication as a “crisis discipline” at the 2005 Conference on Communication and the Environment. In 2007, a revised version of his speech was published in the inaugural issue of the journal Environmental Communication. See Robert Cox, “Nature’s ‘Crisis Disciplines’: Does Environmental Communication Have an Ethical Duty?” Environmental Communication 1, no. 1 (2007): 5–20.

6 Pezzullo, “Environment,” 11.

7 For more on this species and its plight, see David R. Foster, ed., Hemlock: A Forest Giant on the Edge (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014).

8 See Aaron M. Ellison and Benjamin H. Baiser, “Hemlock as a Foundation Species,” in Hemlock: A Forest Giant on the Edge, ed. David R. Foster (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 93–104.

9 Barnett, Mourning in the Anthropocene, 154.

10 I have discussed some of this complexity in the following essays: Joshua Trey Barnett, “From Ecological Grief to Gelassenheit: Rhetorics of Sentiment and Science in Hemlock,” Environmental Communication 15, no. 6 (2021): 783–97; Joshua Trey Barnett, “Ecological Care’s Compromised Conditions: Reflections from Cook Forest,” Essays in Philosophy 24, no. 1/2 (2023): 102–20.

11 See Tim Palmer, Twilight of the Hemlocks and Beeches (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018), 133–44.

12 Thom van Dooren first brought the entanglement of care and violence to my attention. See Thom van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2014), 87–122. See also Thom van Dooren, “Invasive Species in Penguin Worlds: An Ethical Taxonomy of Killing for Conservation,” Conservation and Society 9, no. 4 (2011): 286–98.

13 In addition to the texts already mentioned, see Phaedra C. Pezzullo, “Introduction,” in Green Communication and China: On Crisis, Care, and Global Futures, ed. Jingfang Liu and Phaedra C. Pezzullo (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2020), xiii–xliv; Phaedra C. Pezzullo and Robert Cox, Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere, 6th ed. (Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publishing, 2022). In these texts, Pezzullo does not so much revise as reiterate her initial conceptualization of environmental communication as a “care discipline.”

14 Here is an up-to-date but non-exhaustive bibliography of such work: Kelly Pender, Being at Genetic Risk: Toward a Rhetoric of Care (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018); Pamela Pietrucci and Leah Ceccarelli, “Scientific Citizens: Rhetoric and Responsibility in L’Aquila,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 22, no. 1 (2019): 95–128; E. Cram, Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in the Making of the American West (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2022); Savannah Greer Downing, “Toward Reproductive Justice Rhetorics of Care: State Senator Jen Jordan’s Dissent of Georgia’s Heartbeat Bill,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 109, no. 4 (2023): 376–99; Jennifer Clary-Lemon, Nestwork: New Material Rhetorics for Precarious Species (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2023); Danielle Endres, Nuclear Decolonization: Indigenous Resistance to High-Level Nuclear Waste Siting (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2023); Debra Hawhee, A Sense of Urgency: How the Climate Crisis Is Changing Rhetoric (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2023); Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Beyond Straw Men: Plastics Pollution and Networked Cultures of Care (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2023).

15 For a brief but helpful summary of Western ideas of care prior to the mid-twentieth century, see Warren Thomas Reich, “History of the Notion of Care,” in Encyclopedia of Bioethics, ed. Warren Thomas Reich (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1995).

16 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010), 175–220.

17 Mayeroff distinguishes his project from Heidegger’s here: Milton Mayeroff, “On Caring,” International Philosophical Quarterly 5, no. 3 (1965): 462.

18 Milton Mayeroff, On Caring (New York, NY: William Morrow, 1971), 1.

19 Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 151–74.

20 For an incisive discussion of the marginalization of care, see Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York, NY: Routledge, 1993), 111–22.

21 The value of care is a major theme in, among others, Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984); Carolyn Merchant, Earthcare: Women and the Environment (New York, NY: Routledge, 1996); Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006); Thom van Dooren, “Care,” Environmental Humanities 5, no. 1 (2014): 291–94; Joan Tronto, Who Cares? How to Reshape a Democratic Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018); Kyle Powys Whyte and Chris Cuomo, “Ethics of Caring in Environmental Ethics: Indigenous and Feminist Philosophies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics, ed. Stephen M. Gardiner and Allen Thompson (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018), 1–17; Hil Malatino, Trans Care (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2020); The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence (London, UK: Verso, 2020).

22 For example, see Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 66–98.

23 Cram, Violent Inheritance, 30.

24 Pezzullo, “Environment.”

25 Pezzullo, Beyond Straw Men, 3.

26 Ibid., 158.

27 Clary-Lemon, Nestwork, 140.

28 Noddings, Caring, 43.

29 Tronto, Moral Boundaries, 153.

30 Sarah Clark Miller, “A Kantian Ethics of Care?” in Feminist Interventions in Ethics and Politics: Feminist Ethics and Social Theory, eds. Barbara S. Andrew, Jean Keller, and Lisa H. Schwartzman (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 111.

31 Tronto, Moral Boundaries, 153.

32 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 55.

33 Tronto, Moral Boundaries, 137.

34 For an excellent and necessary discussion of the role that exclusion plays in care, see Eva Haifa Giraud, What Comes After Entanglement? Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).

35 See Barnett, “Ecological Care’s Compromised Conditions.”

36 María Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 164.

37 See van Dooren, Flight Ways, 87–122.

38 The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto, 3, emphasis mine. I am generally sympathetic to the Care Collective’s project. My critique here is limited to the sharp boundaries they draw around care, boundaries which appear to exclude rhetoric.

39 Ibid., 11.

40 Pezzullo, Beyond Straw Men.

41 Ella Myers, Worldly Ethics: Democratic Politics and Care for the World (Durham, NC: Duke, 2013), 87.

42 Ibid., 86.

43 Ibid., 87.

44 Ibid., 93.

45 See Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (2004): 225–48.

46 Myers, Worldly Ethics, 93.

47 Ibid., 95, 95, 95, 95, 96, 96, 97, 98, 98.

48 Thomas B. Farrell, “The Weight of Rhetoric: Studies in Cultural Delirium,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 41, no. 4 (2008): 470.

49 Ibid., 472.

50 For a similar view, see Chris Ingraham, Gestures of Concern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).