What makes a “culture of care”?

The global pandemic sharpened attention on the need to re-think care and redefine our values and the ways in which we reproduce and/or transform them. In recent years, many commentators have been drawing attention to a ‘crisis of care’ – see, for example, The Care Manifesto of The Care Collective (2020), Labours of Love The Crisis of Care by Madeleine Bunting (2020) or Emma Dowling’s The Care Crisis (2021). In responding to this crisis this research project seeks to address two main areas: First, the need to visibilise the often invisible care work that underpins our economies and our societies – the very weave of our social fabric. Second, in tandem with this process of visibilsation, the need to re-value care and care-work, recognising it for the vital role it plays in all our lives. Both areas focus attention on the question – “what must be possible in order for care to be given and received?” In turn, this raises a wider set of questions and issues that focus on distinctive human ways of knowing and being, and on the structures, institutions and practices that motivate, enable and/or constrain our care and care-work.

A starting premise of “cultures of care” is that in the process of redressing how we understand (visibilise and value) contemporary care work – work that is largely focused on child-care, domestic care, health care, social care, care for the elderly, and palliative care – we also come to visibilise and value the role that care and caring plays in and across all walks of life, including all productive and ‘good’ work. The aim is not to relativise care work, nor to appropriate the language of care for neoliberal ends; it is not an exercise in ‘care-washing’. Rather, the project’s intention is to offer an alternative complementary tactic that responds to the crisis of care – one that seeks to avoid an unintended positioning of care work against other forms of work, and instead recognises, supports and enables cultures of care everywhere. In so doing, it is hoped that the value of the vital life-enhancing and life-sustaining role of care workers – be they working with children, families, patients, elderly or the dying – will be properly recognised. More than this, care and caring will come to be visibilised and valued in and across our institutions, organisations, industries and society as a whole.

Cultures of Care asks questions about the nature of care itself. Our starting point (one we envisage being developed through the ongoing research) is:

Cultures – our systems of value recognition

Care – those practices that maintain, continue and/or repair our world in order to live as well as possible, requiring the ability to see/hear others’ needs and to take responsibility to fulfil these needs

Cultures of care – the cultures we reproduce and transform everyday that enable us to care and be cared for

Cultures of Care is based out of the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries (CMCI), King’s College London.