Paper short abstract:

Drawing on posthuman and STS theories of care, this presentation argues that care practices aimed at healing and preserving the world are linked to how the world unfolds for individuals in their everyday life, as a web of actors to which they can feel (or not) affective and moral attachments.

Paper long abstract:

Lately, environmental problems have been a central element of attention for posthumanism and Science & Technology Studies (STS). Submersed on a relational and symmetrical ontology of the world, care emphasizes these interconnections and mutual dependence. Ideas such as "care networks" (Krzywoszynska, 2019), "support ecologies" (Duclos and Sánchez-Criado, 2019), and "ecologies of care" (Bowlby & McKie, 2018) enable a different grammar for thinking about ways to preserve the environment and respond to the ongoing climate crisis. Interrelated and interdependent networks are latent between individuals, technologies, microbes, plants, and the planet itself.

This presentation shows the results of research conducted in Chile that emphasized these interrelationships and interdependences based on individuals' ability to respond attentively to their surrounding worlds. Using care as a central concept, we highlight how these articulations are not a moral duty but a necessary vital condition for mutual survival (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, 2019). Thinking with the idea of "support ecologies", we reflect on how different objects and subjects are supported and cared for and how they influence their support conditions (Duclos & Sánchez-Criado, 2020). Different ways of understanding care emerge and diffract, leading to alternative practices (un)deployed under its name (Duclos & Sánchez-Criado, 2020). Furthermore, in urban spaces, individuals' capacity to care for the world seems entangled with their ability to sense, be moved and affected by different and uncertain ideas of what nature is and how it intertwines with everyday locations and infrastructures in the city and its surrounding.