Materialities Of Care

Materialities of Care addresses the role of material culture within health and social care encounters, including everyday objects, dress, furniture and architecture. Makes visible the mundane and often unnoticed aspects of material culture and attends to interrelations between materials and care in practice Examines material practice across a range of clinical and non-clinical spaces including hospitals, hospices, care homes, museums, domestic spaces and community spaces such as shops and tenement stairwells Addresses fleeting moments of care, as well as choreographed routines that order bodies and materials Focuses on practice and relations between materials and care as ongoing, emergent and processual International contributions from leading scholars draw attention to methodological approaches for capturing the material and sensory aspects of health and social care encounters

Medical Materialities investigates possible points of cross-fertilisation between medical anthropology and material culture studies, and considers the successes and limitations of both sub-disciplines as they attempt to understand places, practices, methods, and cultures of healing. The editors present and expand upon a definition of ‘medical materiality’, namely the social impact of the agency of often mundane, at times non-clinical, materials within contexts of health and illness, as caused by the properties and affordances of this material. The chapters address material culture in various clinical and biomedical contexts and in discussions that link the body and healing. The diverse ethnographic case studies provide valuable insight into the way cultures of medicine are understood and practised.

In gerontological research the understanding of age and ageing changed in the last decade. Biologic determined explanations no longer prevail in this research field. Instead, ideas of social constructivism are frequently used. These ideas define the state of age and the process of ageing as social constructions, steeping ageing in social and cultural assumptions, ascriptions, and expectations. From a social constructivist perspective, age and ageing are not (just) identified as dependency, deficit, and need for care – as it was foremost accelerated from a biological perspective – but with the life course and thus with individual lifestyles, experiences, attitudes and practices, as well as institutional and economic structures. A prominent social constructivist concept is “doing age.” Similar to “doing gender” the concept of “doing age” assumes age as taking place in the form of a social praxis within everyday life interactions between people and thus in performances, embedded in discourses, through which social hierarchies and ideals proceed. Despite the paradigm shift that social constructivist concepts enable in gerontological thinking, they reveal their blind spot when it comes to the materiality of ageing and thus to fleshy-sensual experiences, human and non-human ontologies and agencies. Addressing these materialities of ageing brings up its own critique on definitions of ageing bodies and material environments. This framing does not presume that age and ageing are solely products of human-to-human interactions or those of formative environments or of discourses. Rather humans, non-humans, and discourses become essential parts of ageing processes. Such a material framing enables us new insights into forms of age and ageing and thus offers an opportunity for scholars to engage critically with materialities of age and ageing. This eBook explores theoretical, methodological, and empirical concepts of such a 'Material Gerontology'.

In what way is »care« a matter of »tinkering«? Rather than presenting care as a (preferably »warm«) relation between human beings, the various contributions to the volume give the material world (usually cast as »cold«) a prominent place in their analysis. Thus, this book does not continue to oppose care and technology, but contributes to rethinking both in such a way that they can be analysed together. Technology is not cast as a functional tool, easy to control - it is shifting, changing, surprising and adaptable. In care practices all »things« are (and have to be) tinkered with persistently. Knowledge is fluid, too. Rather than a set of general rules, the knowledges (in the plural) relevant to care practices are as adaptable and in need of adaptation as the technologies, the bodies, the people, and the daily lives involved.

This collection opens up spaces where lives end, bodies are disposed of and memories generated: hospitals, hospices, care homes, coroners' courts, funeral premises, cemeteries, roadsides, the spirit world. Using material culture studies it illuminates the ways human beings make meaningful the challenges of death, dying and bereavement.

This book gathers the revised and selected contributions to the 6th Dementia Lab Conference, D-Lab 2022, held on September 20-22, 2022, in Leuven. It describes original and innovative research on how design can contribute to the quality of life of people with dementia, their loved ones, and caregivers. The papers highlight the value of participation within design, analyzing it at three levels: personal, product, and organizational. The presented ideas and findings address ‘The Residue of Design’ and go beyond the initial impact of the design itself by looking at what benefits design research brings for people with dementia. The papers cover topics such as the development of creative design methods to foster participation and engagement from people with dementia, evaluation studies or critical reflections that reveal the impact of products and the built environment in dementia care, and raising awareness and countering stigma in societal views on dementia.

To care can feel good, or it can feel bad. It can do good, it can oppress. But what is care? A moral obligation? A burden? A joy? Is it only human? In Matters of Care, María Puig de la Bellacasa presents a powerful challenge to conventional notions of care, exploring its significance as an ethical and political obligation for thinking in the more than human worlds of technoscience and naturecultures. Matters of Care contests the view that care is something only humans do, and argues for extending to non-humans the consideration of agencies and communities that make the living web of care by considering how care circulates in the natural world. The first of the book’s two parts, “Knowledge Politics,” defines the motivations for expanding the ethico-political meanings of care, focusing on discussions in science and technology that engage with sociotechnical assemblages and objects as lively, politically charged “things.” The second part, “Speculative Ethics in Antiecological Times,” considers everyday ecologies of sustaining and perpetuating life for their potential to transform our entrenched relations to natural worlds as “resources.” From the ethics and politics of care to experiential research on care to feminist science and technology studies, Matters of Care is a singular contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary debate that expands agency beyond the human to ask how our understandings of care must shift if we broaden the world.

In this important contribution to urban studies, Juliet Davis makes the case for a more ethical and humane approach to city development and management. With a range of illustrative case studies, the book challenges the conventional and neoliberal thinking of urban planners and academics, and explores new ways to correct problems of inequality and exclusion. It shows how a philosophy of caring can improve both city environments and communities. This is an original and powerful theory of urban care that can promote the wellbeing of our cities’ many inhabitants.