Geographies of Care and Responsibility

Abstract

Across the decades geographers have been concerned with questions of our ethical responsibilities to care. It would seem that care is nothing new in geography. I argue however, that contemporary societal shifts are extending market relations into caring realms of our lives and that we are witnessing reductions in public provision of social supports. These twin trends have made care a more pressing concern and have simultaneously marginalized care from view. Geographers are well positioned to draw attention to these trends and I urge us to think about our responsibility to care about these issues, and the geographies that they make. I ask us all to think about our responsibilities as geographers to pose questions in the face of (i) market extensions, (ii) currently pervasive discourses of personal responsibility (for poverty, inner city decline, unemployment, etc.), and (iii) the withdrawal of public support from many crucial arenas. Care ethics focuses our attention on the social and how it is constructed through unequal power relationships, but it also moves us beyond critique and toward the construction of new forms of relationships, institutions, and action that enhance mutuality and well-being. I consider how our research, teaching, and professional practices might shift in conversation with care ethics. Care ethics suggests that we build spatially extensive connections of interdependence and mutuality, that we attend to the ways in which historical and institutional relationships produce the need for care (extension of market relations; famine, unnatural disasters, environmental and cultural destruction), and that we take up social responsibility in our professional practices.

Nearly all of us care, because we ourselves know what it means to have our hearts cut away by life…

—(Kingsolver 2002)

Key Words:

• feminist ethic of care
• responsibility
• spatial extensiveness of care

Acknowledgments

I am deeply indebted to colleagues who provided support and constructive criticism on the ideas presented here. From among the many who inspired and instructed me along the way, I am particularly indebted to Michael Brown, Lynn Staeheli, Katharyn Mitchell, Lucy Jarosz, Hester Parr, Paul Cloke, Alexander Murphy, Peter Wissoker, and Matt Sparke. All errors are mine.

Notes

1. From Lee and Smith (2004, 2), “ethics as moral theory, and morality as practical action. Ethics involves reflection on moral values—their origin, meaning and justification. Morality refers to what people believe and what they do in pursuit of their conceptions of the right and good.”

2. These organizations have funded and orchestrated efforts to bring Academic Freedom legislation into consideration in twenty-two states (with passed or pending resolutions in eleven states in 2006).

3. As the Chronicle of Higher Education (Lang 2004, C4) reported “no one survives a 40-year career in this business, or any, without confronting personal tragedy.”

4. Similarly, Paul Farmer's work in Haiti links health crises to the structural violence of neoliberal policies that deny the very poor access to nutrition or medication. He argues that for very poor people, choices both large and small are limited by the combined structural violence of racism, sexism, political violence, and grinding poverty. Here again, he makes a moral argument for limiting the neoliberal extension of markets into all realms of life (Farmer 2005).

5. For example, we can take responsibility for how our science and our educational missions are being constructed in current efforts to frame our contributions in political (marketized, product-oriented, neutral) terms, as individual productivity or as responding to our students as “clients.” We can pose critical questions to the Academic Bill of Rights Legislation under consideration at Federal and State levels. Similarly, we can construct caring responses in the face of a move toward standardized testing of university students.