ABSTRACT This Symposium examines the ‘tensions of care’ that permeate the everyday practices, politics and infrastructures of care particularly in the Global South. Building on debates about the crisis of care and the unequal distribution of reproductive labour, the collection foregrounds how care is simultaneously sustaining and depleting, agentic and constraining, enabling and exploitative. By centring proximate, vernacular and historically situated forms of care, the contributions reveal how caring relations are shaped by gendered, racialised and classed inequalities, and how they are mobilised within neoliberal, capitalist and imperial formations. The papers illuminate contradictions inherent in care—from sustaining life under conditions of scarcity to reinforcing those very conditions—and offer vocabularies such as ambivalence, friction and contradiction to analyse these dynamics. While attentive to care's limits and its entanglement with structures of harm, the Symposium also highlights moments of resistance, relationality and alternative possibilities for collective and institutional care.
Allen et al. (Sun,) studied this question.