Critical Approaches To Care

Care shapes people's everyday lives and relationships and caring relations and practices influence the economies of different societies. This interdisciplinary book takes a nuanced and context-sensitive approach to exploring caring relationships, identities and practices within and across a variety of cultural, familial, geographical and institutional arenas.

What does ‘care’ mean in contemporary society? How are caring relationships practised in different contexts? What resources do individuals and collectives draw upon in order to care for, care with and care about themselves and others? How do such relationships and practices relate to broader social processes? Care shapes people’s everyday lives and relationships and caring relations and practices influence the economies of different societies. This interdisciplinary book takes a nuanced and context-sensitive approach to exploring caring relationships, identities and practices within and across a variety of cultural, familial, geographical and institutional arenas. Grounded in rich empirical research and discussing key theoretical, policy and practice debates, it provides important, yet often neglected, international and cross-cultural perspectives. It is divided into four sections covering: caring within educational institutions; caring amongst communities and networks; caring and families; and caring across the life-course. Contributing to broader theoretical, philosophical and moral debates associated with the ethics of care, citizenship, justice, relationality and entanglements of power, Critical Approaches to Care is an important work for students and academics studying caring and care work in the fields of health and social care, sociology, social policy, anthropology, education, human geography and politics.

This comprehensive collection offers a unique look at nursing practice, theory, research and nursing history from various critical theoretical perspectives. It aims to initiate an international discussion among scholars from diverse countries, particularly Germany and Anglo-American countries, coming from distinctive schools of thought, e.g. German Critical theory and Post-structural approaches, and influenced by their respective histories of sciences. This book analyzes and criticizes nursing theory, nursing research and practice along several dimensions: Nursing Ethics, Subjectivity, Body and Flesh (Leib), Technology, Power, History, and Education.

How can we plan, organize, distribute, and offer care in ways that treat both those who need it and those who provide it with dignity and respect? Using the example of residential services, Troubling Care: Critical Perspectives on Research and Practices investigates the fractures in our care systems and challenges how caring work is understood in social policy, in academic theory, and among health care providers. In this era defined by government cutbacks and a narrowing sense of collective responsibility, long-term residential care for the elderly and disabled is being undervalued and undermined. A result of a seven-year interdisciplinary research project-in-progress, this book draws together the work of fourteen leading health researchers, including sociologists, medical practitioners, social workers, policy researchers, cultural theorists, and historians. Using a feminist political economy lens, these scholars explore and challenge the theories, work organization, practices, and state-society relations that have come to shape long-term care. Troubling Care offers critical perspectives on the often disquieting arena of care provision and proposes alternatives for thinking about and meeting the needs of some of our most vulnerable citizens in ways that go beyond residential care. This book seeks to bridge not only the gaps between disciplines, but also those between theory and practice. Features: takes an interdisciplinary approach, making this work appropriate for courses in a variety of disciplines including sociology, medicine, social work, health policy, cultural studies, and political economy includes the work of fourteen leading health researchers, including sociologists, medical practitioners, social workers, policy researchers, cultural theorists, and historians bridges the gap between theory and practice by incorporating both theoretical research and specific case examples

What is ‘good care’ and does more choice lead to better care? This innovative and compelling work investigates good care and argues that the often touted ideal of ‘patient choice’ will not improve healthcare in the ways hoped for by its advocates.

Tait and White provide a much-needed introduction to the complex field of critical care nursing for undergraduate and postgraduate students. Covering the essential aspects of critical care nursing, students are asked to consider the biopsychosocial triggers of critical illness, and are walked through a number of different patient scenarios. Reacting to the Francis Report and other inquiries into standards of care, Tait and White’s humanising approach to critical care places equal emphasis on the ′head, hand and heart′ knowledge; evidence, technical and ethical. The book’s depth of clinical knowledge is built and cemented through extended case studies of critically ill patients with a variety of needs. This breadth, along with the author’s unique approach prepares students for courses and assignments in critical care, as well as preparing critical care nurses for clinical decision making and practice. A must-have for anyone studying or working in critical care nursing.

During the Cold War the concept of international security was understood in military terms as the threat or use of force by states. The end of EastÐWest hostilities, however, brought ‘critical’ perspectives to the fore as scholars sought to explain the emergence of new challenges to international stability, such as environmental degradation, immigration and terrorism. The second edition of this popular and highly respected text offers a wide-ranging and comprehensive analysis of the growing field of critical security studies. All the chapters have been fully revised and updated to map the on-going evolution of debates about international security since 1989, including the more recent shift in emphasis from critiques of the realist practices of states to those of global liberal governance. Topics covered include the relationship between security and change, identity, the production of danger, fear and trauma, human insecurity and emancipation. The book explores the meaning and use of these concepts and their relevance to real-life situations ranging from the War on Terror to the Arab Spring, migration, suffering in war, failed states and state-building, and the changing landscape of the international system, with the emergence of a multipolar world and the escalation of global climate change. Written with verve and clarity and incorporating new seminar activities and questions for class discussion, this book will be an invaluable resource for students of international relations and security studies.