Diverse Economies of Care-full healthcare: Banking and Sharing Human Milk

Lindsay Naylor

Contemporary systems of healthcare and other industries are largely defined by their neoliberal, capitalist character. However, this parochial approach to understanding the political economy of healthcare misses the myriad activities that make up the “care” in healthcare. Receiving care is not isolated to capitalist exchanges, nor is it unquestionably tied to the neoliberal marketplace. There exist diverse economies of care within, outside, and alongside neoliberal capitalist ones. Moreover, there are multiple means by which we may define care that are often overlooked.

Troubling care in the neonatal intensive care unit

Lindsay Naylor, et al.

The neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) is a site of medical treatment for premature and critically ill infants. It is a space populated by medical teams and their patients, as well as parents and family. Each actor in this space negotiates providing and practicing care. In this paper, we step away from thinking about the NICU as only a space of medical care, instead, taking an anti-essentialist view, re-read care as multiple, while also troubling the community of care that undergirds it.

The Body as a Site of Care: Food and Lactating Bodies in the U.S.

Lindsay Naylor

The breast/chestfeeding body is a site of intense politics and power relations in the United States. Hardly a week passes without an incident in the news of a person being publically shamed, or unlawfully asked to change their behavior while using their body to feed their infant in public. Lactating bodies are deemed out-of-place. Simultaneously, birth-parents are judged on their infant feeding practices, with those who do not nurse cast outside of the biologically deterministic ‘good mother’ role. This framing causes the nursing or not-nursing body to become a site of debate.

Caring labour: redistributing care work

Kelly Dombroski

In this chapter, Kelly lays out the case for proliferating and valuing caring labour, so that all kinds of different people might share in it.

A Community Economies perspective for ethical community development

Ann Hill
Gradon Diprose
Front cover of book Ethics, equity and community development

Community Economy theory has gained much traction over the past two decades as a language politics and an ethical tool kit for researchers and practitioners in the field of community development. This chapter examines Community Economy approaches to development using two empirical examples from quite different contexts that highlight key ethical concerns.

Care-full Community Economies

Kelly Dombroski
Stephen Healy
Katharine McKinnon
Image of book cover, feminist political ecology and the politics of care

In this era of human-induced environmental crisis, it is widely recognized that we need to foster better ways to sustain life for people and planet. For us – and other scholars drawing on the Community Economies tradition – better worlds begin in recognising the diverse and interconnected ways human communities secure our livelihoods. Community Economies scholarship is a body of theory that evolved from the writings of geographers J.K. Gibson-Graham, which, for more than thirty years, has inspired others (including the three of us) to rethink economy as a space of political possibility.

Journeying from "I" to "we": Assembling hybrid caring collectives of geography doctoral scholars

Kelly Dombroski
Alison Watkins
Helen Fitt
Jillian Frater
Jasna Turkovic
Karen Banwell
Kieran McKenzie
Levi Mutambo
Franz Persendt
Soo Young Ko
Deirdre Hart

We describe the PhD Journey as one which is logistical, emotional and intellectual. We analyse our own experiences of collectivising aspects of doctoral study and supervision in the post-disaster context of Christchurch, describing -- and assembling -- a hybrid caring collective that included a variety of things from quakes to cakes.