Imagining futures of everyday care: generating the otherwise

Abstract

In a world of overlapping crises, this research asks, how do we make more space for care? Today, care is a heavily theorised and studied aspect of life, with diverse scholars insightfully naming care wherever it happens and framing it within wider political discourses and human/nonhuman assemblages. These scholars describe the gendered and racialised work and burden of care, as a largely private practice shaped by patriarchal systems, market logics and uneven socio-economic conditions. In this context, there are good reasons why scholars do not focus on the joy and power of care in the present. Yet, the focus on care as a site of struggle obscures the beauty and potentiality of care, almost rendering it off limits in feminist theory. As a result, little attention has been given to more generative and playful approaches to theorising and valuing care, such as imagining everyday care in the future.
In response, this study explores people’s hoped for futures of everyday care in Australia. It asks: How might we become more care-savvy? How do we cultivate fairer and more interesting ways to care? What tools are needed to care well?
To do this, I propose care futurity as the process of engaging in the future to imagine care and its possibilities, as a way of telling new stories about how to care. Using ethnographic methods, including participant interviews and creative vignette writing, this thesis fills a futures gap in empirical care scholarship. The work draws on emerging anthropological approaches to the future, but also grounds the process of futuring in people’s embodied experiences and knowledge of everyday care, using these past-present-future relations as a way to generate culture that needs to exist.
Presenting impressions of an otherwise, these research findings disrupt usual reflections on care, which take existing and often unexamined conceptions of time and place as natural and structural constraints. Focusing on the temporal, ethical and spatial aspects of people’s stories, these futures push back against isolating and circumscribed norms of care today, which include forms of bland care, to imagine care as a more shared, convivial, chaotic and public practice that goes beyond the gendered, privatised present. Through these frames of time, ethics and space, I explore future conditions of care as the resources, routines, spaces, technologies and policies that open up care as something better synthesised with the rest of life.
Future-making is non-linear, messy and partial and it does not solve the ambivalence of care. Yet, the data reveals the many ways that imagination and hope can embolden everyday care, giving us new resources and models with which to to think and act. It provides visions that are boldly and necessarily excessive, revealing our small expectations for care today, but also people’s needs for more creative, interesting and intellectually engaged concepts and practices of care. As a method, amplifying people’s humble and beautiful hopes—full of homework, chopping vegies and annual leave—provides a disruptive starting point for care studies and practices in Australia and beyond. It reorientates us toward desirable futures in which care takes up more space, clarifying its rightful place in the world; a vital dimension of thinking and planning liveable futures.

Date of Award	2025
Original language	English
Supervisor	Sarah MASLEN (Supervisor), Michael WALSH (Supervisor) & Kim RUBENSTEIN (Supervisor)