Paper short abstract:

Care as distributed agency aims to decentre freedom as a necessary condition for the possibility of ethics by retaining the ambivalence of care as a productive nexus of inquiry from the standpoint of the situated and embedded co-constitution of material and immaterial human needs.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I examine and conceptualise care as distributed agency with reference to the conjuncture of austerity welfare in post-crisis Portugal. Care as distributed agency aims to elicit the practices, meanings and ethics underpinning the caring labours, efforts and investments sustaining the distribution of resources to meet human needs that maintain, restore and enhance the individual and collective potential and capabilities of agency. I focus on the critical role played by women's various forms of paid and unpaid care work to respond to the material and immaterial needs of impoverished individuals and working-class households. Moving beyond a freedom-centred perspective in ethics, care as distributed agency argues for considering how ethical reasoning, practice, and enactment emerge from distributive struggles to confront and negotiate the tensions between fact and value that shape the identification, fulfilment and valuation of human needs, particularly within conjunctures of shifting economic and political processes.