Care

This chapter calls for a “Manifesto of Radical Care” in Geography. The call for radical care acknowledges the Whiteness that permeates much of the feminist literature of care. Black and postcolonial theorists, such as Patricia Hill Collins and Uma Narayan, have called for feminist scholars to adopt more inclusive approaches to the development of a care praxis. A radical ethics of care might seem incongruous, as “radical” usually invokes far-reaching social change, while understandings of “care” often point to the private, personal and intimate. A serious engagement with uncomfortable intimacies offers a starting point for moving beyond incomplete and superficial acknowledgments of vulnerability, and towards a more holistic and radical conceptualisation of care across difference. Many of us who employ a radical caring praxis are cast as “feminist killjoys”, including in our disciplinary homes, a term that Sara Ahmed utilises to encapsulate detractors’ silence accompanied by micro-aggressions when killjoys speak out within their institutions.