‘Care of the Body: spaces of practice,’ edited by Centre for Medical Humanities Associate Director Sarah Atkinson, Victoria Lawson and Janine Wiles, is the latest special issue of Social & Cultural Geography.
From the editors’ introduction: “Care—concept, emotion, practice, politics, moral exhortation—is a starting point for a range of critical geographies. Care affords geographers a richness of possibilities through which to engage critically with a range of politically charged discourses. This special issue offers a suite of ‘think’ pieces on geographies of care which provoke further examination of three challenges. First, we need conceptual strategies to explore the connections of care across different spatialities and temporalities. Secondly, biases within current research on care help make invisible the multiple sites through which our practices are shaped. Thirdly, certain concepts within the care lexicon have gone unchallenged such as dependency and vulnerability.We contemplate the potential of imagining care both as relation and as flow. The nodal characteristic of a relational care shapes how care flows through those nodes to focus on the spatial and temporal unevenness and inequalities in care, the processes eroding situated traditions of care, and the spaces and practices facilitating care of the body.”
Social & Cultural Geography, 2011, Vol 12, (6).
Contents
Care of the body: spaces of practice (introduction to the special issue)
Sarah Atkinson, Victoria Lawson and Janine Wiles
Reflections on being a recipient of care: vexing the concept of vulnerability
Janine Wiles
Friendship, co-presence and care: neglected spaces
Sophie Bowlby
Scales of care and responsibility: debating the surgically globalised body
Sarah Atkinson
Recentring care: interrogating the commodification of care
Maia Green and Victoria Lawson