Location or dis-location? Towards a conceptualization of people and place in the care-giving experience

Over the last two decades we have seen an increased interest in informal care within both political and academic communities in the UK. This has stemmed in large part from an increased emphasis on the home-space as the preferred site of care provision and a resultant increase in the complexity of the care-giving relationship. The explicitly spatial dimensions of this caring relationship, however, are vastly under-researched. This paper represents one attempt to redress the gap by examining the importance of place, and its conceptualization, in the care of frail older people. In doing so, the paper focuses, firstly, on the spatial manifestation of care at various scales, identifying some of the processes behind variations in the care-giving experience and, secondly, using the example of dementia care, it considers how Auge´'s concepts of anthropological place and non-space, when applied to domestic and institutional care settings, can facilitate a more nuanced understanding of the importance of people and place in the construction and delivery of care to frail older people.     

Farmwomen's emotional geographies of care: a view from rural Ontario

This article contributes to geographies of rural women's health by investigating farmwomen's perceptions of their caring roles and responsibilities, which are crucial to the wellbeing and sustainability of rural people and their communities. Featuring a thematic analysis of interviews and a focus group with farmwomen from Ontario, Canada, the research examines farms and farming as unique places and spaces of care. Informed by the literature on emotional geographies, the article examines how care is situated and performed through farmwomen's negotiation of multiple, overlapping identities and how these are embodied and affective in emotional work. The findings not only confirm the paramount role of women in rural care, they demonstrate the interdependence of family, community and work as central to the challenges of rural women's health. The article argues that the link between health and productivity on the farm is crucial to understanding farmwomen's caring, and highlights the paradox that their emotional work is as much about opportunities for power and resistance as it is about obligation and subordination.     

Spaces of care in the city: the place of a community drop-in centre

This paper explores the ways in which drop-in centres may at times function as spaces of care in the city. Drawing on participant observation research within a particular centre in Bristol, a city in south-west England, it focuses upon social relations within the drop-in space and the various subjectivities that were observed to emerge in this relational environment. Through a consideration of individuals who appeared to be positively assisted by their involvement in the drop-in, a sense is developed of the different ways in which such agencies may function as spaces of care. Use is made of Carl Rogers' notion of the core conditions for successful therapeutic encounter, as developed within the person-centred school of humanistic psychotherapy, to explicate these positive experiences. At the same time it was clear that some individuals found the drop-in to be a less than comfortable or even exclusionary environment. The paper concludes by reflecting on the broader significance of drop-in centres as caring environments and on the value of humanistic conceptions of therapeutic relation for interpreting organizational spacings of subjectivity.     

Progressive localism for an ethics of care: Local Area Co-ordination with people with learning disabilities

In the UK devolution to ‘new’ nations and localities is generating differences in the tone and substance of social care. In Scotland there is an apparent rejection of the ‘personalisation’ model dominant in England and other neoliberal welfare states; in its place, there is an emphasis on locally based co-produced care provision, involving local organisations, practitioners and individuals. The paper argues that this is an outcome of the open and deliberative nature of policy-making, and the further devolution of social care provision to local authorities in Scotland. Local scale networks and spaces of provision are generating a ‘progressive localism’, contesting the association between the local scale and financial austerity, drawing on a relational understanding of place. Non-commodified and locally-based provision expands the discourse of care from ‘caring for’ individuals to ‘caring about’ people and places, in what is termed an ‘ethics of care’. The paper uses the example of people with learning disabilities to examine a more broadly conceived ‘caring’ within local communities, offering possibilities for inclusion and belonging. The paper draws on interviews with key policy makers and place-based care practitioners, known as ‘Local Area Co-ordinators’.     

Archives and care: Caring archival research practices in geography

Archival research has been long recognized as a key method in geography, and such research continues to appeal to scholars excavating historical influences on contemporary places. At the same time, geographical literature on care is growing rapidly. However, while geographers have often implemented care into their archival research and practice, these literatures have remained largely distinct from each other. In this paper, I bring archives and care into closer conversation. Drawing on existing geographical literature on care and on archival methods, work in archival studies, and my own research and ethnographic experiences in archives, I show how the socio-material practices of geographers in the archives help generate spaces of care, where ethical caring practices exist, and caring relationships flourish. I demonstrate how archival work in geography and beyond includes relationships of care between archivists, researchers, and archival records. I share some examples and strategies that geographers and other researchers can—and do—follow in maintaining, continuing, and repairing archival relationships, even in times of precarity and uncertainty.     

Women's paid work and moral economies of care

Female labour force participation has been increasing in recent decades, in part encouraged by state policies to raise the employment rate to encourage economic competitiveness and combat social exclusion. Social provision for care, however, has lagged behind this increase, creating practical and moral dilemmas for individuals and for society, facing parents with complex choices about how to combine work and care. In this paper, we draw on a qualitative study in London to explore the extent to which the large-scale entry of women into waged work is altering women's understandings of their duties and responsibilities to care for others. We conclude that their decisions are influenced by class position, entrenched gender inequalities in the labour market, varying abilities to pay for care and complex gendered understandings of caring responsibilities.     

Moral geographies of family: articulating,forming and transmitting moralities in everyday life

The family is often considered the foundation of moral learning in society, responsible for caring and parenting, and transmitting morals to children and young people, while a lack of moral guidance from family is associated with antisocial behaviour. Despite this deep moralizing of family life, very little is known about how morals are understood in the context of family, how family members form their moral outlooks, and how morals and difference are negotiated within everyday family practices. This paper addresses some of these burgeoning questions around the moral geographies of family. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research with six families in the UK, I consider normative assumptions about what morals mean to families, which parts of family life morals are drawn from, and how morals are transmitted by and within families. In the conclusion I outline my contributions to both established and emerging areas of geographical interest.     

Race and feminist care ethics: intersectionality as method

Gender has been the privileged optic through which care ethics has been theorised. However, a long line of theorists has argued that gender intersects with other vectors such as race, class and disability in the social world, including in caring practices. This paper contributes to the emergent literature on intersectionality and care ethics by focusing on how racialised difference affects care practices and therefore care ethics. It focuses on competence and alterity, and recognition and communication, as two elements that point to how racialised care is risky. It argues that slavery and colonialism have underpinned racial hierarchies marking contemporary racialised care encounters. As a result, racially marked people’s skills are often undervalued and their competency questioned even as race becomes an increasingly important difference between who cares and who receives care. Secondly, racial hierarchies in who gets care and what that care looks like can make care so distinctive as to be unrecognisable both to the care giver and those who need care. Lack of care is as productive of subjectivities as care so that care needs simply may not be articulated. Finally, given these differences in what care means, caring can become risky. The paper concludes by suggesting that thinking through intersectionality as method allows us to focus on moments and events where care can become unsettled. Care ethics should learn not only from its successes but also from instances when care has failed. We need a feminist care ethics that responds to the distance and difference that race brings to care. That is the promise of good care.     

Towards an understanding of local protest: hospital closure and community resistance

The aim of this paper is to suggest an analytical framework through which the complex question of hospital closure and local protest can be further explored. The significance of this area of study lies with the extraordinary events that surrounded a campaign to save the Kidderminster General Hospital from downsizing. Whilst the hospital was not saved, the local campaign committee organizing the protest took their fight into the political arena and were successful in gaining a parliamentary voice in the 2001 general elections. Such an achievement has had considerable political implications, however, the question asked here is how might we begin to interpret the events that took place. To this end, the paper draws on current geographical literature in an attempt to construct a framework that accounts for both national policy debates and the local context within which such campaigns emerge.     

A widening gap? The political and social organization of childcare in Argentina

This article examines how social policies and programmes implemented in Argentina shape the political and social organization of childcare. The author seeks to analyse how welfare institutions are currently responding to emerging needs, and to what extent they facilitate the defamilialization of childcare for different social classes. Because Argentina lacks a truly unified ‘care policy’, four different kinds of facilities and programmes are examined: employment-based childcare services; pre-school schemes; social assistance care services; and poverty reduction strategies. It is argued that far from offering equal rights and services with a universalist cast, these ‘caring’ institutions reflect the ethos of the current welfare model in Argentina: a fragmented set of social policies based on different assumptions for different social groups, which in turn filter down to the social organization of childcare.     

‘Unlocking the cage door’: the spatiality of counselling

This paper examines the spatiality of counselling, focusing on ideas about positions, boundaries and spaces emerging from practitioners' accounts. Counsellors describe counselling as a practice within which the relative positions of self and other are explored and negotiated. To that end, counsellors adopt a contradictory position in relation to expertise, claiming to be experts in not being experts. Counselling transgresses bureaucratic boundaries between different forms of care, and normative boundaries of secrecy. In their place, counselling works with spatio-temporal, confidentiality and ethical boundaries, which are simultaneously concrete and specific, fluid and illusory. These boundaries create spaces within which the interplay of reality and fantasy can be explored. These spaces can be understood in terms of processes of exteriorizing the inner worlds of clients and interiorizing external spaces including those made available by counsellors and counselling services. The spatiality of care associated with counselling strategically invokes binary distinctions, for example, between reality and fantasy, but also disrupts dualistic conceptualizations of space in favour of an understanding of space as simultaneously real, imagined, material and symbolic.     

明清时期乡村社会治理的空间机制——基于领域性视角

从地理学视角看,乡村治理的过程主要表现为乡村空间权属和空间权力的配置,即领域化和再领域化。本文从当代乡村治理的问题出发,运用领域理论分析明清时期乡村治理中的空间-社会关系及其领域化机制。研究表明：县级政府构建的行政领域难以实现全面有效的治理,乡绅主导构建的社会领域基于乡村特征划定边界和提供公共物品并部分替代了行政领域,其具体领域化机制为家族-宗族-乡族三级治理体系。本文认为明清时期乡村治理存在多元领域,行政领域与社会领域通过有效的协调机制相互补充使乡村治理更有效。乡村治理应注重对当地社会领域和市场领域的培育,同时增强行政领域治理的有效性及其与其他领域的协调能力。     

国内外农村居民点区位研究评述

随着人类经济社会的发展,居民点的外在特征和空间结构也在不断的演化与变迁,居住地点的选址和布局最能反映出人类活动与地理环境之间的相互影响与作用机制。目前国内外在城市居住区位研究方面已经形成大量研究成果,相比之下,农村居民点相关研究还存在一定滞后。文章从居民点区位影响因素、区位演变、居民点分布和等级结构四方面对国外相关研究进行了评述,梳理了国内农村居民点区位研究的相关内容,在此基础上对存在的问题进行了讨论和总结,并对今后研究内容进行了展望。     

“Why would they care?”: Youth,resource extraction,and climate change in northern British Columbia,Canada

Discussion about local decision making tends to overlook rural and remote youth engagement. Resource extractive industries are, however, fixtures in many rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities in settler colonial British Columbia, Canada. These industries shape youths' perceived options for social and economic ventures when they are looking towards their futures. By engaging literature on climate change, settler colonialism, and critical Indigenous studies, and drawing on empirics from workshops conducted with youth from northern British Columbia, this paper explores how rural and remote northern and Indigenous youth engagement and perspectives can transform discussions on climate change and resource extraction. The paper documents how rural and northern youth have been engaged in environmental decision making, particularly in light of resource extraction. The paper also suggests that environmental decision making has at times been extractive itself. The paper concludes that when engaged meaningfully, youth desire to work collectively against social and environmental injustices.     

Children caring for their worlds: The politics of care and childhood

This paper builds on political geographies of children and youth by looking at the ways children express their political agency through acts of caring. Ethnographic research was conducted with a group of 19 children aged 9–11 years old in a rural town in New Zealand. This paper discusses the results of a photojournal project in which the children were given disposable cameras to use as a way to explain their cares and concerns in their daily lives and in the larger world around them. Drawing on Tronto's care ethic framework in which subjects are active in maintaining, continuing and repairing their worlds, the children's photojournals illuminated their abilities and efforts to care for their worlds. As a political concept, care brings attention to interdependences, connections and relationships that are essential to our individual and collective survival and often overlooked in liberal political theory. This paper demonstrates that the framework of care and exploring children's everyday caring practices help us better understand the often unacknowledged political agency of children.     

A place to transform: creating caring spaces by challenging normativity and identity

Like all spaces, concrete caring places both shape and are shaped by understandings and constructions of normativity and identity. The traditional understanding of care for older people, imagining clearly demarcated dyadic roles, is firmly embedded in heterosexual logics of relationships within families, the own (family) home and institutional support. Social and residential places for older people thus both assume particular gender and sexual identities and contribute to a (re)production of the very normativity. But how can this interlinkage between the construction of caring spaces and the normativity of identities be understood and, possibly, challenged? In this article we discuss the transformative potential of the social (and partly residential) space of La Fundación 26 de Diciembre, in Madrid, Spain, which opened up to specifically support older LGBT people. Drawing on an in-depth case study we explore a space that allows visibility of different forms of living and caring practices of people with different genders, sexual preferences, origins, classes or political backgrounds. Through the daily life narratives of the people who work, volunteer or simply use the centre we discuss the potential of challenging the restricted notions, assumptions and constructions through which particular places gain both social and political meaning. The article highlights the transformative power of the active and collective making of caring spaces through which narratives of care, collective sexual and gender recognition and practices of caring relationships can replace both traditional/informal forms of living together and institutional spaces that provide professional care.     

乡村性研究综述与展望

乡村性是乡村地理学研究的重要内容,是综合反映乡村发展水平、揭示乡村内部差异、识别乡村地域空间的重要指标。本文通过对国内外现有研究成果分析,深入剖析乡村性的研究进展,从概念内涵、研究方法、尺度关联和应用层面方面进行系统总结与评价。在此基础上提出未来乡村性研究的重点方面,主要集中在乡村性概念的模型构建、微观尺度的分析、社会化的转向和时空过程研究等。加强乡村性的研究有利于拓展乡村地理的研究视角,丰富乡村地理学在乡村性研究的深层次内涵,有助于更深入破解乡村发展的内在机理,也为城乡一体化发展提供理论指导和技术支撑。     

Voluntarism and long-term care in the countryside: the paradox of a threadbare sector

This article contributes to the burgeoning literature on the geographies of voluntarism by addressing how voluntary sector providers in rural communities respond to the downloading of responsibilities for health and social care associated with public service restructuring. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of long-term care in Ontario, it focuses on the consequent actions of non-profit organizations, community support groups and volunteer caregivers in three different rural settings. Despite evidence of increasingly disproportionate levels of voluntarism amongst rural communities, the results reveal sector- and place-specific opportunities that allow voluntary sector providers to overcome the limitations of the rural service environment. The findings suggest that in the longer run, however, the growing dependence on local solutions will only exacerbate the uneven geographies of health and social care across rural space. Resolving this paradox remains a critical yet neglected challenge for sustainable rural services and communities.     

The emergence of an ethic of care in rural Kenyan schools? Perspectives of teachers and orphaned and vulnerable pupils

In the context of HIV, there is considerable debate about the role of schools and teachers as potential sources of care and support for vulnerable children. This qualitative research examines ‘care’ as experienced and practiced by pupils and teachers in rural Western Kenya. In primary and secondary schools, interviews were conducted with 18 teachers and 57 orphaned and vulnerable pupils, alongside Photovoice. Drawing on thematic analysis and an ‘ethic of care’ theoretical perspective, we unpack the informal caring practices of teachers within resource-constrained settings. The research provides glimpses of schools as spaces of care, participation and support for orphaned and vulnerable pupils. Recognising and providing institutional support for the development of an ethic of care in schools may help to tackle the considerable educational barriers facing girls and boys who are orphaned and vulnerable and move ‘care’ closer towards the centre of educational policy and practice in the global South.