Unthinking care

Within and beyond the field of communication, invocations of “care” are rising. In this brief essay, I complicate how scholars of communication relate to care as a feeling, practice, ethics, and politics in two ways. First, I uncover several complexities inherent to care–care’s partiality, relation to neglect, and frequent entanglement with violence/harm. Second, I suggest that scholars of communication should bring our distinctive theoretical and methodological insights to bear on the questions about care. Rather than treating care as an unquestioned good, I propose instead that we embrace care’s messiness. Doing so, however, may require that we unthink care.