“Talkin’ ‘bout a Revolution”: Change for Care, and Care for Change

Care theorists have had enough. Decades of neoliberalism, followed by financial crisis, austerity, gender backlash, and, in 2020, a worldwide infectious disease pandemic, have clearly tested their patience. The titles alone of three recent books on the ethics and politics of care suggest a change in tone; indeed, “radical,” “revolutionary,” and “manifesto” are generally not words we associate with the scholarship of those interested in the everyday practices of responding to the needs of others. And yet for Maurice Hamington, Lynne Segal, and co-authors Jennifer Nedelsky and Tom Malleson, these quotidian practices, and the ethos that underlies them, are more radical than they seem. Indeed, these volumes suggest that a commitment to care—a commitment that is both ideational/ethical and material—is necessary to usher in the kind of politics we so desperately need today. It could be, then, that with their latest books, these authors are edifying and formalizing what we might call the “radical turn” in research on care—a turn that can be roughly said to have begun in 2020 with the Care Collective’s The Care Manifesto (Verso) and the parallel Care Manifesto (Femnet) written by and for women of Africa, Asia, and Latin America a year later.