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

I.

How do we come to see some things as worthy of our grief and, thus, of our concern and care? This is the question at the heart of my book Mourning in the Anthropocene. There, I argued that our ability to grieve beyond the human is best understood as a rhetorical achievement, a capacity cultivated through rhetorical practices such as naming, archiving, and making-visible more-than-human others that have been, are being, and might yet be lost as a result of human actions. Inspired by and working with Judith Butler’s concept of “grievability,”¹ I claimed in the epilogue that grieving and caring are inextricably entangled. Explaining how this relation plays out, I wrote:

We grieve for who and what we care about. Our regard for, our love of, another moves us to grieve their loss; in their absence, we find ourselves bereaved. And yet, at the same time, we care for who and what we would mourn. When we recognize that the loss of the other would leave us bereft, deprived of a sustaining relation, we do whatever we can to prevent that loss from coming to pass.²

If this is so, then rhetorical texts, performances, and phenomena that move people to see particular more-than-human others as worthy of their grief can, I argued, be understood as enactments of care. When imbued with a sense of rhetorical agency, I concluded that,

we have the power to fashion worlds in which our fellow humans care about other beings and ways of being who find themselves at risk. With these tools at our disposal, we possess a powerful means of caring for the earth that bore and sustains us.³

By creating and circulating “caring rhetorics,” I wagered, perhaps we can begin to heal the wounds that fossil-fueled humans have inflicted on ourselves, our human and more-than-human kin, our relations, and our earthly home.

As we will soon see, I am hardly the only scholar of rhetoric or communication who cares about care. If recent trends continue, care – understood simultaneously as a feeling, a range of material-symbolic practices, an ethical orientation, and a political undertaking – is likely to become an important concept for scholars of rhetoric and communication. And because Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies focuses particularly on the dynamic interplay of communication and power, I suspect – and hope – that it will play host to many critical conversations about the promises and perils of care in the years and decades to come. As the Journal turns twenty, I hope in this brief essay to underscore the importance of studying care and to illuminate some potential paths forward for thinking, writing, and teaching about the relations among communication and care.

My own turn to care was stimulated in part by Phaedra C. Pezzullo’s provocative and much-cited claim that environmental communication scholars ought to be led not only by an ethics of crisis but by an ethics of care.⁴ Early in the field’s formation, J. Robert Cox likened environmental communication to conservation biology on the grounds that both are “crisis disciplines,” or disciplines in which intellectual tenets give rise to normative principles that obligate scholars and researchers to do what they can to prevent or mitigate environmental harms.⁵ Like conservation biologists, Cox contended, environmental communication scholars have an “ethical duty” not just to understand ecological crises but to intervene in them, too. A decade later, in an encyclopedic essay that traces the meanings of “environment” in communication studies, Pezzullo charged that the crisis framework, while necessary, is insufficient. “Environmental communication,” she wrote, “should be appreciated as a discipline formed to address both crisis and care.” Practically, this entails “unearthing human and nonhuman interconnections, interdependence, biodiversity, and system limits” as well as accepting that we have a duty not just to “prevent harm,” as Cox had it, but to “honor the people, places, and nonhuman species with which we share our world.”⁶ On the one hand, describing environmental communication as a discipline devoted to care simply underscores Cox’s earlier point: in the face of environmental crises, we ought to care. On the other hand, though, Pezzullo’s amplification of care reminds us that precisely because we are living in times of profound ecological and earthly upheaval, we ought to attend to the myriad ways that people are attempting to care for themselves, their communities, their relations with more-than-human others, and the earth itself.

While revising Mourning in the Anthropocene, I became enthralled by efforts to save the eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis), an evergreen tree native to large swaths of eastern North America. Since the early 1950s, the eastern hemlock, and its scarcer cousin, the Carolina hemlock (Tsuga caroliniana), have been fading from forests as a non-native insect – the hemlock woolly adelgid (Adelges tsugae) – spreads across much of their range.⁷ The tiny adelgids mate and reproduce on the hemlocks, from which they also sap vital nutrients. Infested trees typically succumb to the insects within a few years. As the trees disappear, so too do the unique ecological processes and communities that the slow-growing, long-lived conifers generate and sustain.⁸ Animated in part by a sense of anticipatory grief, property owners, environmental organizations, and managers of public lands alike have devoted much time, energy, and money to caring, “rhetorically and otherwise,” for these imperiled trees.⁹

As I learned more about the caring rhetorics and labors that sustain hemlocks, it became clear that the highly normative and more-or-less commonsensical idea of care with which I had been operating did not adequately account for the complexity I was witnessing.¹⁰ To safeguard the hemlocks, the adelgids must die. To destroy the adelgids, caretakers often mobilize pesticides – the neonicotinoids imidacloprid and dinotefuran, in particular – and biological controls – other insects (themselves often non-native) that caretakers hope will consume, and therefore reduce or even eradicate, the offending “invasive pests.”¹¹ Caring for hemlocks, it turns out, can be quite violent.¹²

When I eventually set out to write about the complexities I was witnessing, I turned again to Pezzullo’s work on care¹³ and to the small but growing cadre of rhetorical scholars who are increasingly invoking “care” or gesturing towards an “ethics of care” in their written work.¹⁴ In doing so, I hoped to discover resources for grappling with the messiness of care that I was encountering in my own research. I found many resources. But I also found that I needed a deeper and more philosophical account of care than most of my colleagues had yet provided. And so, I ventured a bit farther afield to see what philosophers, feminist ethicists, political theorists, and environmental humanists (among others) have said about both care and care ethics. It is to some of the lessons I have learned along the way that I now turn.

II.

Thinkers have long considered care.¹⁵ But only in the mid- to late-twentieth century did something resembling a sustained intellectual dialogue on care emerge. Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time marks one significant touchstone. For Heidegger, to be human is to care – to have cares, in the sense of burdens, and to enact care, in the sense of sustaining another.¹⁶ Milton Mayeroff’s On Caring marks another important touchstone. For Mayeroff, care matters less because it is “man’s distinctive way of being”¹⁷ and more because of the role that caring, understood as a concrete practice, plays in human life. In On Caring, he describes caring as “helping another grow.”¹⁸ More than either of these texts, however, Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice paved the way for the conversations about care that would follow and that continue today. A psychologist by training, Gilligan critiqued then-dominant conceptions of moral development on the grounds that they naturalized patterns of moral reasoning that are commonest among men and, in the process, disregarded or denigrated patterns of moral reasoning frequently enacted by women. According to Gilligan, the women in her studies repeatedly emphasized care for others (and for themselves) as among their most salient moral considerations. Rather than looking for and applying rules or principles, as one guided by deontological and utilitarian ethics must, those who adopt an “ethics of care” ask how they can support and sustain the particular others to whom they are attached and for whom they are responsible.¹⁹

Albeit in different ways, these provocations laid the foundation for a reappraisal of the value of care. In dominant Western cultures, care has long been historically articulated and associated with the bodily, the necessary, the private, and the feminine.²⁰ As a consequence, care has been underappreciated in prevailing value systems. In response to this situation, much scholarship on care has been devoted to unearthing the centrality and, thus, the significance of care to human (and, to a smaller extent, more-than-human) life on earth.²¹ Care matters, at least in part, because all living beings (and many non-living things, too) require care to survive and flourish. Instead of relegating care to the background or treating it as irrelevant to collective concerns,²² scholars of care convincingly contend that because we all need care, we owe it to ourselves and others to honor and celebrate care. Without care, we would be nothing, and so we ought to value care not only in instrumental terms but, more fundamentally, as the very condition of earthly coexistence.

In some significant sense, this is as far as rhetorical scholars go in their engagement with care. For instance, when E. Cram gestures to an “ethics of care” as a positive alternative to extractive, unjust, ecologically destructive practices and cultures, they recognize the value of care but do little to engage its complexities.²³ Moreover, they do not tell readers what they mean, exactly, by an “ethics of care,” or how this ethics is different from others we could choose from. Or, to take another example, when Pezzullo supplements Cox’s focus on crisis with a focus on care, she argues for the importance of caring to earthly coexistence but does little to uncover care’s intricacies.²⁴ Care, readers are led to conclude, is simply good. In her latest book, Beyond Straw Men: Plastic Pollution and Networked Cultures of Care, Pezzullo offers a far richer take on care – richer, in large part, because she treats care as one of a “contingent array of tactics addressing a complexity of challenges in imperfect yet impactful ways,” or what she has come to call “impure politics.”²⁵ And yet, even in Beyond Straw Men one gets the sense that care is fundamentally good, an activity we ought to value principally because, as Pezzullo contends in the conclusion, “we need to collectively resist uncaring.”²⁶ The caring/uncaring binary runs throughout Pezzullo’s work. In Nestwork: New Material Rhetorics for Precarious Species, Jennifer Clary-Lemon presents one of the most sophisticated perspectives on care in the field of rhetoric – and especially environmental rhetoric. Even as Clary-Lemon attenuates her arguments about the power of care, though, she still frames care as primarily a matter of finding ways to “live well” not only with other humans but with our more-than-human kin, too.²⁷ I certainly do not contest that care is necessary if any of us is to stand a chance of living well, but care – as my opening example should remind us – can also make some lives less livable.

We need not only to celebrate care, but to grapple with its complexities. According to many scholars of care, one of the distinctive features of care ethics – as opposed to, say, Kantian or utilitarian ethics – is that it is guided not by universal principles or rules, but by attention and responsivity to the specific needs and interests of particular others. In Caring, the feminist philosopher Nel Noddings presents the view this way: “The one-caring […] does not seek security in abstractions cast either as principles or entities [e.g. laws or ‘God’]. She remains responsible here and now for this cared-for.”²⁸ This is not to suggest that one cannot, or should not, affirm the general principle that “one should care.”²⁹ Some care ethicists even speak of a “duty to care” triggered by “certain needs” present in others.³⁰ But even if one believes that one should care in general or that one has a responsibility to care in certain circumstances, neither the general principle nor the duty tells one how to care for the specific needs of specific others under specific conditions. As Joan Tronto wrote in Moral Boundaries, “care is distorted if we separate the principles of care – that care is necessary – from the particular practices of care in a given situation.”³¹ It matters absolutely for whom or what one is caring. Different subjects of care have different needs. And so, care should look different depending on who or what one seeks to sustain into the future.

Herein lies another of care’s often-overlooked complexities: even if one affirms the principle that one ought to care, or that one ought to care more, or that one ought to care better, one cannot care for everyone and everything. And so, decisions must be made. We must decide with whom and what to “cast our lot.”³² To quote Tronto once again, “Caring will always create moral dilemmas because the needs for care are infinite” and our capacities to care are finite.³³ These “moral dilemmas” are felt, arguably, by both individuals and collectives who must come to terms with the fact that they can only care for some and, therefore, that they will fail to meet the needs of countless others. Indeed, this sort of focusing is necessary to care well: if I were to try to attend to all needs, I would inevitably fail to meet them all and, moreover, I would fail to meet them well. So, even as care involves attention and responsivity to the needs of specific others, it often entails neglecting a great deal else. This does not mean that care adheres to a zero-sum logic; we can and do care about and for many things at once, and my care for one need not always be at the expense of the other. At a fundamental level, however, we must reckon with the partiality of care, with the uncomfortable fact that some beings and ways of being will inevitably be excluded or left behind precisely because we care about, and for, others.³⁴

If caring for some often requires that we exclude or neglect others, it also sometimes demands that we go further. Indeed, caring well sometimes involves perpetuating harms. When is this the case? I have in mind those instances when needs conflict with one another, when what is good for X turns out to be bad for Y. My opening example is one such instance: because hemlock woolly adelgids cause eastern and Carolina hemlocks to die, caring well for the trees involves killing the insects. The needs of the hemlocks are simply incommensurable with those of the adelgids; in the contact zones where these species meet, it is impossible to care well for both.³⁵ In Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds, María Puig de la Bellacasa captures the ethical dilemma: “Sometimes,” Puig de la Bellacasa writes, “the question of care might mean that we have to engage with issues concerning if, why, and how to kill and for what.”³⁶ Importantly, in such instances, violence is not only the dark flipside of care. In cases where incommensurable needs make it such that caring well for some means harming others, the harm and the care are one and the same. In such moments, we must be willing to say: to care, I harm, and by harming, I care. When this is so, we enact what Thom van Dooren calls “violent care.”³⁷

Throughout this section, I have alighted on three dimensions of care that are often ignored or underdiscussed in rhetorical scholarship on care – care’s partiality, care’s relationship with neglect, and care’s entanglement with harm. Engaging with these dimensions more fully promises to enrich and complicate communication scholars’ work on care. For critical/cultural scholars in particular, attending to the interplay of care, neglect, exclusion, and harm is a way to light up the power dynamics that suffuse all caring relations. Rather than presuming that care is an uncritical good, I believe we learn more when we bear in mind that care is inevitably good for some but not all. With regards to care, then, we need to ask not just “cui bono?” (who or what benefits?) but also “cui malo?” (who or what suffers?). Only by keeping both questions twined together do we approach a full sense of care’s impacts.

III.

In the previous section, I suggested that communication scholars could gain a more theoretically nuanced understanding of care by engaging with scholarship on care and care ethics. In this section, I speculate on how rhetorical scholars in particular can contribute to theories of care. I focus on rhetoric because, having devoted much my adult life to studying rhetoric, this is the subfield of communication with which I am most familiar. My narrow focus should not, however, lead readers to conclude that those working in other subfields have nothing to add to this lively conversation. Quite the contrary! My hope is that this all-too-brief foray will encourage scholars across communication to imagine how their distinct theoretical and methodological insights could be brought to bear on questions about care.

Although most theorists of care do not attend explicitly to rhetoric, others approach rhetoric with trepidation. For example, the authors of The Care Manifesto set out by differentiating between “care” and “talk of care” before arguing that “talk of care” often masks a “lack of care.” Writing in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, they lamented: “Although we are hearing much more about care in these unsettling days, carelessness continues to reign. Our manifesto is written to redress this lack of care.”³⁸ They go on to introduce the term carewashing, which, like greenwashing, is meant to name hypocritical corporate and bureaucratic rhetorics – rhetorics which purport to be caring but that, in reality, are uncaring.³⁹ (Among others, Pezzullo has adopted the notion of carewashing in Beyond Straw Men.⁴⁰)

But not all theorists of care disregard or decry rhetoric. In one of the most insightful books on the subject, Worldly Ethics: Democratic Politics and Care for the World, Ella Myers – a political theorist – describes a mode of care that ought to be of particular interest to those of us whose principal concern is with the roles that rhetoric plays in shaping shared life on earth. Myers focuses on what she calls “a mode of collaborative caretaking that is directed not at a person or even persons but at the conditions of their lives.”⁴¹ The sort of care to which Myers directs our attention is enacted by a plurality of people on behalf of what she calls a “worldly thing” – “a practice, place, law, habit, or event” – about which they mutually care.⁴² Caring for such worldly things is how we care for the “world,” a concept that Myers inherits from Hannah Arendt and which she understands as “the complex, extrasubjective ‘web’ that constitutes the conditions of our lives.”⁴³ Caring for the world as such, Myers argues, is a democratic undertaking. And although this sort of care does not elide the challenges mentioned earlier – namely, the fact that care often involves neglect, exclusion, or harm – it does distribute the responsibility for decisions about just whom and what to care about and for to a collective. Caring for “worldly things,” in other words, is no more “pure” or “innocent” than the sorts of care we enact on our own. Care, at whatever scale, remains fraught.

Throughout Worldly Ethics, Myers repeatedly acknowledges the contingency of the worldly things about and for which groups of people come to care. “Recognizing plural worldly things as the objects of democratic action,” Myers argues, “invites us to tend to processes of politicization.”⁴⁴ Echoing Bruno Latour’s observation that “matters of fact” can be transformed into “matters of concern,”⁴⁵ Myers suggests that scholars concerned with collective modes of care should ask how “an entity, practice, habit, or policy become[s] such a [worldly] thing.”⁴⁶ Myers then identifies “dispute,” “public presentation,” “protests,” “demonstrations,” “signification,” “collective articulation,” “naming and renaming,” “(re)defining,” and “persuasion” as some of the means of transforming practices, entities, habits, policies, and other matters into worldly things around which people gather caringly.⁴⁷ In other words, and perhaps unwittingly, Myers begins to articulate a rhetorically-inflected concept of care.

Rhetorical scholars should continue to develop a rhetorical notion of care. Rhetoric is not simply the opposite of care. Nor is rhetoric simply a powerful tool for covering over a pernicious “lack of care.” Nor still is rhetoric simply a means of promoting or advocating for care. Rhetoric is, rather, a fundamental mode of care. This idea, although never (to my knowledge) spelled out in quite this way, is not so new. For instance, Thomas Farrell makes a similar argument in “The Weight of Rhetoric.” There, Farrell defines rhetoric as “the art, the fine and useful art, of making things matter.”⁴⁸ For Farrell, one of rhetoric’s key functions is modulating magnitude. Magnitude deals with scale and weight – with, that is, whether something “looms large” or “feels pressing” and, consequently, with “whether an audience may care about any topic sufficiently to attend to it, to engage it, and to act upon it.”⁴⁹ To, in other words, care about or for it.⁵⁰

However, Farrell’s definition of rhetoric requires revision. I would add that rhetoric is not just how we “make things matter” but how we make some things rather than others matter, on the one hand, and how we make things matter in some ways rather than others, on the other. At first glance, these revisions might lead us to distinguish between caring and uncaring rhetorics, as some rhetorical scholars have done. After all, if every rhetorical text, practice, or performance is necessarily partial, making some issues, and not others, seem worth an audience’s attention, engagement, and action, then we should be capable of judging some rhetorics as caring and others as uncaring. But I believe these revisions of Farrell’s definition ought to lead us to a different, and perhaps unsettling, conclusion – namely, that all rhetorics are caring rhetorics.

Accepting the claim that all rhetorics are caring rhetorics does not mean abdicating our critical orientation. Rhetorical scholars still have a responsibility to judge. But if all rhetorics are caring rhetorics, if all rhetorics (even those we dislike and those we find abhorrent) sustain some things into the future rather than others, we must do more than distinguish between caring and uncaring rhetorics. Our task becomes one of tracing how any given rhetoric cares for some and not others by constituting caring publics that care about – and, in the process, become willing to neglect and even harm – some and not others. By doing so, we can concurrently celebrate care, honor care’s complexity, and recognize care’s entanglement not only with rhetoric but with communicative phenomena in all their diversity.

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).