Matters of Care

María Puig de la Bellacasa’s Matters of Care expands feminist care ethics into technoscience and more-than-human worlds without turning care into a comforting moral slogan. Care is simultaneously an affect, material labor, and ethical-political obligation; it sustains worlds but can also be exhausting, coercive, selective, or paternalistic. The phrase “matters of care” names both neglected things that demand attention and the practices through which some relations are maintained while others are abandoned.

The first half develops a politics of knowledge from feminist science and technology studies. To “think with care” is not to suspend criticism but to ask how research participates in what it studies, which beings and labors become visible, and who bears the consequences of detachment. The later chapters turn to soil, microbes, agriculture, and ecological time. Care for soil cannot be reduced to quick repair or individual virtue; it asks humans to work within rhythms and dependencies that exceed managerial control.

The book’s speculative, dense vocabulary can make it less immediately usable than a policy text, and extending agency beyond the human must not erase unequal human labor, colonial land relations, or Indigenous political authority. Its value lies precisely in preventing easy innocence. Care is not automatically good and no one can care for everything. FemRes readers can use the book to ask how obligations are chosen, whose maintenance work disappears, and how to sustain shared worlds without converting care into ownership over those being cared for.