Thinking with Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s Matters of Care: Concerns, Care, and Justice

Social justice has become the panacea for all types of concerns and issues—providing a sense that all concerns are worthwhile, comprehensive, and matter for today’s world. Thus, developing alternative concepts, ideas, and imaginaries can potentially provide solid grounds for scholars to advance beyond conventional understandings about social justice. Therefore, this manuscript aims to experiment with ethics of care as a conceptual device to disrupt Trumpism, as well as propose alternative worlds where sport, youth/athlete development, and social justice can connect otherwise. Specifically, efforts will be deployed to advance notions concerning sport–social justice in ways beyond our contemporary understandings. The work of feminist theorist and scholar Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (and many other human, non-human and more-than-human entities) is used to situate care as a relational doing. Moving forward, alternative worlds with alternative caring responsibilities matter if youth sport is to continuously thrive for justice. The conventional game of sport–social justice inquiry may have consequences and implications for caring that may be deemed unsustainable and continued sources of oppression. Therefore, caring becomes much more than a fact, a concern, or a concept. It becomes an ontological compromise, an ideal, and an ontological project for scholarly work, which implies a willingness to navigate towards the unknown and unprecedented—potentially our main caring responsibility as scholars.