From socially just care to socially just distributed ecosystems of care

Actions or interventions intended to redress systemic injustice necessitate centring the values of equity and care. We have pursued work on the complex interrelation of these two important concepts and how they manifest in practice in education, for institutions, for networks and communities, and for people. This article builds on our work on ‘socially just care’, a term we coined while developing our Equity/Care Matrix (Bali and Zamora, 2022). This paper extends that work using a duoautoethnography, building upon our personal experiences. We elaborate and extend the work into a more complex picture: in order to have impact, socially just care must be enacted in a Socially Just Distributed Care ecosystem. This paper articulates our model and uses examples from our duoautoethnography to demonstrate a wide variety of multi-country contexts within education where equity and care work are enacted and theorised. We will analyse the places where some work falls short of our ideals, highlight contexts that give us hope, and share our aspirations for socially just distributed ecosystems of care.