Beyond directional care: Theorising mutuality in the geographies of care through the lens of friendship

The geographies of care has portrayed care as a directional relation moving from a carer to cared-for subject. This analytic has been built on a binary of ‘caring-for’ (practical labour) and ‘caring-about’ (emotional attentiveness), which does not reflect the mutuality of friendship. In friendship, care is not something one does for another, but arises in the very fact of mutual presence. In response to Bowlby’s identification of friendship as ‘neglected space’, this paper conceptualises care-with – a non-directional analytic lens that conceptualises care as mutual co-presence rather than directed movement. Drawing on assemblage theory's relational exteriority, care-with attends to the everyday practices of co-walking, shared meals, and companionship, without necessarily stipulating clear roles of giver or recipient. Such peer-generated support is increasingly important as austerity and ageing populations put pressure on formal services, yet it remains analytically and politically sidelined. We first outline the trajectory of directional logics and their elision of friendship, before tracing care-with across spatial, temporal and more-than-human dimensions to show how care is co-produced with environments, rhythms, and non-human actants. The article advances a framework for legitimising friendship as care, while offering a vocabulary for studying wider forms of mutuality that can be found in care geographies.