Care is a matter of responsibility for human and nonhuman allies, an ecological network. Care is an imperative, and acting with care approaches the world beyond selfhood. ON CARE, an aggregate of voices, discusses the politics of caring, support, and the role of welfare in an increasingly neoliberal society. It questions who is seen as worthy of care, whose narratives are given attention, and whose lives are overlooked in a complex web of assemblages: conceptions of medical authority, the co-option of self-care in political rhetoric, care as a commodity in the hospitality industry, intergenerational intimacy, sexecology; care as utopian and care as transactional. ON CARE maps a constellation of perspectives, as testaments, fictions, and essays, addressing the relation between good health, interdependence, and the ethics of (self)care. 

Contributors: Tom Allen, Uma Breakdown, Alice Butler, Oisín Byrne, Julia Calver, Jamie Crewe, Juliette Desorgues, Rachel Genn, Laura Godfrey-Isaacs, Laura González, Holly Graham, Helen Hester, Justin Hogg, Juliet Jacques, Mati Jhurry & Rebecca Jagoe,  Juliet Johnson, Sophie Jung, Daisy Lafarge, Elisabeth Lebovici, Rebecca Lennon, Rona Lorimer, Katharina Ludwig, Mira Mattar, Martina Mullaney, Cinzia Mutigli, Carolina Ongaro, Molly Palmer, Roy Claire Potter, Nat Raha, Helena Reckitt, Ruiz Stephinson, Erica Scourti, Victoria Sin, Himali Singh Soin & Tyler Rai, Miguel Soto Karlovic,  Isabella Streffen, Jamie Sutcliffe, Maija Timonen, Lynn Turner, Rosa-Johan Uddoh, Daniella Valz Gen, Nina Wakeford, Alberta Whittle 

‘This collection comes out at a time when care has been revealed as both vital and criminally undervalued by reckless governments. Simultaneously serious and playful, it alights on some of the many zones in which care is implicated: kinship relations, gardens, care homes, classrooms, archives, and the body itself. It alerts us, too, to the dangers in care’s commodification, all the while dancing across a range of forms with glee. It’s a book that could not be more poignantly resonant at this moment.’ 
–> Katherine Angel
‘The coronavirus pandemic has exposed the political conditions of care more than at any other time over recent decades. The politics of public health are not only an expression of new forms of governmentality but the plaything of global economic forces. The discourse of ‘care’ is intersected by hammering questions of gender, racism, disadvantage and inequality, biopolitics, capital, and labour—all strike the immense wave of covid-19 at a sharp angle, the impact as powerful as it is precarious. What do these conditions make of care and care work? What do they mean for concepts of home, family, love, relationship, duty, responsibility, neglect? Such questions reverberate through this book like the sound of the sea in a shell.’  
–> Simon Morgan Wortham