Cultures of Care was established in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and widely discussed ‘crisis of care’. It is an interdisciplinary exploratory research project that seeks to better understand the nature and value of care, caring, and care-work, in and across society. The project’s focus is deliberately broad and encompassing. Building on scholarship and practice from many quarters, it is motivated by the possibility of transforming our understandings and practices of care beyond either the professionalised health and social care sector or informal/domestic sphere of child and family care. In so doing, the intention is not to relativise or appropriate the care work that is so under-valued in society, but rather to use the centrality of care to all forms of productive and ‘good’ work to help re-value care for everyone.
The project builds on two conceptual starting points:
Cultures – are conceived of as our ‘systems of value recognition’ (Wilson, 2020; Wilson et al., 2020)
Care – those practices that maintain, continue and/or repair the world in order to live as well as possible (Tronto, 2013); ‘the ability to see/hear others’ needs and to take responsibility to fulfil these needs’ (Held, 2006).
Cultures of Care’s initial framing comprised three strands of activity:
1. Exploratory research – an ongoing review of literature exploring the potential of ‘cultures of care’ as an umbrella concept for springboarding further enquiry.
2. The development of a virtual home for this research and network building – culturesofcare.com
3. Establishing a network of interdisciplinary scholars, researchers, and practitioners, ascertaining the interest for developing an ongoing research area around Cultures of Care (in the first instance at King’s College London, where the project is based).
The first phase of research took place in the summer of 2021. The initial focus was on care in Higher Education. This was followed up by a panel symposium themed around ‘Tolerating Uncertainty’ in January 2022. An all-day workshop exploring our relationship with movement and inspiration – ‘Inspire!’ was held in May 2023. The project’s ongoing research is exploring how ‘cultures of care’ might replace the hegemonic ‘culture of knowing’ that is held to dominate society today. Further workshops and a series of publications is planned over the next 2-3 years.
The research builds on a range of research projects and interventions by the project team.
Wilson (2018) Creativity at work: Who cares? Towards an ethics of creativity as a structured practice of care. In L. Martin and N. Wilson (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Creativity at Work.
Wilson makes the case in this chapter that creativity is a practice of care. This is a theme that is taken forward in Developing Inclusive and Sustainable Creative Economies (DISCE), an EU Horizon 2020 funded research project.
The project also builds on Caring for cultural freedom https://www.anewdirection.org.uk/research/cultural-ecology – a report for A New Direction (2017). The phrase ‘cultures of care’ focuses overt attention on the systems of value recognition that we rely on in society (or not) that promote, enable, and support caring practices – in all their forms.
