Everyday Cartographies of Care

Session convenors:

Dr Jennie Middleton (University of Oxford)

Dr Anna Plyushteva (University of Oxford)

Dr Haifa AlArasi (University of Oxford)

Session outline:

Described as “everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so we can live in it as well as possible” (Fisher & Tronto, 1990: 40), care requires that we focus on the particularities of everyday life it is embedded in (Middleton & Samanani, 2021). Recent accounts (Williams, 2020) have sought to ground abstract notions of care and justice into concrete, embodied and emplaced practices of interdependence and responsibility (Hanrahan, 2015; Raghuram, 2016). In recognising the need to explore concrete practices of ‘caring for’ and ‘caring about’ (Milligan & Wiles, 2010), this session seeks to focus on the relationships between mapping, cartographies, and care. In doing so, the session purposely seeks to keep open the critical space between mapping and cartography whilst attending to questions that include: What does it mean to consider everyday care practices specifically in relation to the ways in which they are mapped? What is rendered (in)visible through such everyday cartographies of care? How do we bring care into mapping and cartography practices?

This session aims to pluralise and pull into dialogue the range of ways in which cartographies of care are brought into being by actors across multiple spatial scales and temporalities. From macro-level accounts of breaking point and catastrophe which reflect the growing care burdens in childcare, elderly care, health/social care amid ageing societies, austerity policies, and gendered inequalities; to the everyday practices associated with living, negotiating, and contesting such pressures within community settings, intimate relationships, and individual lifecourses (see Ramsay, 2022). The session is necessarily broad in scope, seeking to discuss care from perspectives spanning multiple sectors, theoretical and methodological orientations, and geographies.

We invite empirical, theoretical, and methodological papers on topics including (but not limited to):

• critical engagements with the role of cartography and mapping in understandings of care (including ones not aligning with cartographic forms and cartesian convention).

• economic, emotional, material, cultural, and political practices which shape the cartographies of care;

• cosmologies, epistemologies, and methods which can imagine the cartographies of care otherwise;

• the visibility and invisibility of gendered, racialised, classed, and disabled bodies in cartographies of care;

• the role of academics, decision-makers, and diverse publics in the cartographies of care;

• the futures of care in relation to food, housing, health/social care, education, mobilities, infrastructures;

• care practices in relation to social reproduction in the broadest sense; paid and unpaid labour; infrastructural repair and maintenance; volunteering and community work;

• global, regional, and local conceptualisations of the ‘crisis of care’ and its gendered dimensions;

• lifecourse- and household-focused approaches to futures and care, for instance in relation to migration;

• everyday mobilities and immobilities of care.

We are proposing an in-person session but can be adaptable if presenters need to deliver presentations remotely.

To submit an abstract please email the title, presenter information and abstract (max 300 words) to Jennie Middleton (Jennie.middleton@ouce.ox.ac.uk) or Anna Plyushteva (anna.plyushteva@ouce.ox.ac.uk) by Monday 19th Feb (5pm).