Matters of Care

María Puig de la Bellacasa’s Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds asks what care becomes when it is more than a kindly feeling or a private virtue. Drawing on feminist care ethics and science and technology studies, the book holds together three dimensions that are often split apart: the labor of maintaining and repairing worlds, the affective relations that draw us into them, and the ethical-political obligations those relations produce. None guarantees the others. Love without work may leave a relation unsupported; maintenance can be imposed without affection; and declaring an action “good care” is already a political intervention. This friction is the book’s starting point, not a problem it claims to solve once and for all.

The first three chapters turn that question toward knowledge. Chapter 1 extends Bruno Latour’s “matters of concern” through feminist knowledge politics: research does not simply describe a ready-made world but participates in making some beings, labors, and problems matter. A caring account is therefore not just a fuller inventory of things. It asks what its methods and representations do, whose attachments or exclusions they carry, and whether studying an object makes it easier to neglect again. Care becomes a critical practice of involvement, not an approving label placed on research.

Chapter 2 develops “thinking with care” through Donna Haraway’s situated knowledge. Puig de la Bellacasa distinguishes thinking-with, dissenting-within, and thinking-for: learning with others, challenging the conditions one inhabits, and trying to understand another’s situation. The last can slide into speaking for or consuming another’s experience. That danger matters especially to feminist scholarship, which may oppose domination while still claiming authority over the people it studies. The book does not offer a method that makes this risk disappear. Its more demanding proposition is that knowledge is relational and consequential, so researchers must remain answerable to the relations that make their thinking possible.

“Touching Visions,” chapter 3, gives this argument a sensory form. Touch can unsettle the distant, supposedly neutral gaze: contact reminds the knower that bodies and materials affect one another. Yet proximity is not innocence. Touch can be unwanted, abusive, or appropriative; a remote interface may promise intimacy while leaving the user untouched by the consequences of control. The chapter’s distinction is useful beyond technology: being close to a person, community, or ecology does not by itself make a relation reciprocal or ethical. Care requires attention to how the other responds, including when that response is refusal.

This emphasis also sharpens the book’s feminist account of labor. Care is sustained through mundane, repeated work—maintenance, attention, repair—that is easily treated as natural, private, or endlessly available. The book resists demanding affection as proof that a caregiver is doing the work properly, a demand that can intensify exploitation in paid and unpaid care. It also resists the opposite shortcut: warm intentions cannot substitute for material support. A politics of care has to ask who is expected to keep a world going, whose effort remains unseen, and who gets to decide what counts as “as well as possible.”

The turn in Part II is not from theory to a universal answer, but from conceptual argument to situated ecological practices. In “Alterbiopolitics,” the author revisits her participation in a 2006 permaculture training near Bodega Bay, California. Earth care, people care, and returning surplus appear not as abstract principles but as everyday arrangements—composting, tending soil, sharing skills, and organizing collectively. Worms make the politics tangible: they are not merely useful instruments for human flourishing, yet working with them can change what participants notice, value, and feel responsible for. Care here is an ordinary practice that remakes the relation, not a moral credential possessed in advance.

The author is careful about the location of this example. Permaculture is varied, and many practices associated with it also exist in agroecology and Indigenous land care. The movement she encountered is situated in the Global North and has been challenged for its whiteness and privilege. That qualification matters: a language of ecological care can borrow from other traditions while leaving their histories and authorities unacknowledged. Puig de la Bellacasa treats this as a tension to think with, not as proof that one movement represents all ecological knowledge. Her case shows both the promise of collective, practical ethics and the need to ask whose land relations are being learned from, and on what terms.

“Soil Times” brings the book’s most distinctive thread into focus: care has a temporality. Industrial and production-oriented approaches often treat soil as an input whose fertility should keep pace with human demand. The soil foodweb model instead makes visible interdependent lives—microbes, fungi, nematodes, worms, plants—whose rhythms cannot be reduced to a single yield schedule. The argument is not simply that humans should slow down. Care time means making room for several interdependent tempos, including maintenance and reproduction that look uneventful beside innovation, crisis, and measurable output. Ecological care must therefore question the timelines that define efficiency and progress, not just add a gentler intention to them.

The coda leaves a productive difficulty unresolved: when we describe nonhuman activity as care, are we recognizing distributed agency or projecting a human ethical vocabulary onto beings who may not care about us? The author does not claim a final answer. She argues instead that refusing all such speculation can leave human-centered accounts of “services” and “resources” unchallenged, while careless projection can erase difference and coercion. This makes the book demanding but valuable: it offers no universal checklist, and its examples are situated rather than globally representative. Read alongside Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, which foregrounds disability justice and human care infrastructures, or Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble, which develops another situated multispecies politics, it helps readers ask not only “Who cares?” but “What work, relation, and obligation does this particular world require?”

The publisher’s record and chapter list are available from the University of Minnesota Press. Puig de la Bellacasa’s earlier article, “Matters of Care in Technoscience”, develops a related argument but is a separate work.