Care
Description
Patrick Bresnihan:
"The concept of 'care' is helpful in trying to articulate the ethos underlying these situated practices of commoning. Care denotes the immediate inter-dependency of human and non-human life; it expresses relations between particular communities of humans and non-humans that are not fixed or prescribed in advance but are worked out according to and across a variety of different needs and interests. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa quotes Tronto's general 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. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all that we seek to interweave in a complex, life sustaining web" (quoted in de la Bellacasa 2010). The idea that care holds the world together through an interweaving of all aspects of our lives returns us to the interconnectedness and inter-dependency of human and non-human life. Such an understanding brings us beyond liberal notions of ethics that focus on the individual and 'self-care', to the individual as part of a human and non-human collective that must be nourished on an ongoing basis. As Deborah Bird Rose writes "ethics are situated in bodies and in time and in place" (Rose 2004 : 8). Care thus points to the wide scope of attention required to ensure an activity is done 'well', in contrast to simply measuring the output of that activity. This is where a grounded, ethos of care differs from other kinds of biopolitical, output-orientated management tools being applied within resource management." (https://www.academia.edu/11778318/The_More-than-Human_Commons_From_Commons_to_Commoning)
Discussion
Katherine Moebus:
“In recent debates around this topic, the term ‘care’ has become firmly established to describe reproductive activities in a more positive way. Care involves all the activities that reproduce life, including domestic work, child rearing, caring for the elderly and sick, looking after the environment and our neighbourhoods, and also producing knowledge and culture. Economist and historian Friederike Habermann differentiates between reproduction and care as such: reproduction as unpaid labour exploited by capitalism, and care as reproduction’s inherent potential for an economy based on non-monetary relations (2016, 27). This links up with the ‘ethics of care’, a feminine approach to the relational first introduced by Carol Gilligan in 1982. It was criticised by many feminist scholars as essentialist, opposing that gender roles are socially and culturally constructed. Habermann also underlines more attention to a queer-feminist perspective, warning that the construction of identity is mainly based on hegemonic power relations and “co-produced by the profiting subjects (men, whites etc.)” (2008, 2013, 2016). Nevertheless these power relations result, as architect-activist Doina Petrescu points out, in different epistemologies driven by gender: “the reinvention of the commons is a work of the ‘relational’ and the ‘differential’5 in which feminine subjectivity has an active role to play. (…) As such, the imagining of a collective subjectivity that reinvents the commons requires the mobilization of feminist knowledge.” (2010)