Taking care: On care and carefulness
Research Question
What does it mean to care for someone or something, and what do we need in order to take good care?
Project Description
We all need care. Without it, children wouldn’t make it to adulthood, patients wouldn’t recover, and communities wouldn’t grow or thrive. And “care” doesn’t just extend to people, either: if we fail to take care of our possessions, our buildings, and our infrastructure, then our landfills will overflow and our cities will crumble. If we don’t care for the environment, species will go extinct and we will lose vital resources that nourish our bodies and our minds. And if we fail to take care of our planet, future generations will face serious threats to their survival.
In other words: we can’t live without care. At the same time, care rarely gets the time, space and appreciation it needs, resulting in underpaid and overworked healthcare workers, struggling parents, overburdened informal careworkers and a heating planet, among others. So what can we do to make care more visible and more doable?
For this project I’ll interview carers of various stripes as well as academics studying the many aspects of care. In doing so, I hope to find out where and how care manifests itself in our lives, what it does to us and for us, and what’s needed to do it right.
Selected Publications
Why Grandparents Are the Ultimate Essential Workers
How We Turned into Batteries (and the Economy Forces us to Recharge)
Meet The Parenting Expert Who Thinks Parenting Is a Terrible Invention
About the Fellowship
The Journalist-in-Residence programme is an initiative set up together with the Fonds Bijzondere Journalistieke Projecten in 2002. It is a programme for journalists who need a period of uninterrupted time to finish an extensive piece of work. The Fonds Bijzondere Journalistieke Projecten was set up in 1990 by a group of well-known journalists. It funds articles, news analysis, editorial pieces, feature stories and journalistic books or biographies.