Listening to and learning from others in the pluriverse

“Listening to and learning from others in the pluriverse” is how Miriam Williams characterises Kelly Dombroski’s recent book Caring for Life: A Postdevelopment Politics of Infant Hygiene (University of Minnesota Press, 2024). 

Caring for Life is based on Dombroski’s PhD research on ‘hygiene assemblages,’ specifically practices of baniao, or assisted infant toileting, and breastfeeding in Xining (China), Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. 

As Williams highlights in her extended review for Antipode, Caring for Life has two overarching themes. First, the book combines assemblage thinking with historical, ethnographic, and auto-ethnographic methods to explore how practices emerge, endure, and might be altered. The book thereby sheds light on how new practices might be learned and what might be needed to support them.

Second, the book convincingly demonstrates how the favouring of Western-style hygiene practices has cast into shadow a pluriverse of practices that take into account the wellbeing of people and planet—and which have the potential to mitigate the negative environmental and social impacts of Western-style hygiene practices. 

In the terms put forward by John Law, Caring for Life shows the limits of a one-world world perspective which takes a context-specific understanding and universalises it. The book highlights the co-existence of multiple realities and how some of these might be drawn on to facilitate social change and support shifts in knowledge and everyday practices.

Dombroski is co-editor with J.K. Gibson-Graham of The Handbook of Diverse Economies (2020), and co-editor of the 4th edition of Introducing Human Geographies (2024). 

Caring for Life is the most recent publication in the Diverse Economies and Livable Worlds book series which rethinks economic representation, theorises economic diversity, and amplifies the post-capitalist politics that are already present in the ‘here and now.’

Dombroski and Williams are both members of the Community Economies Institute (CEI) and the Community Economies Research Network (CERN). Currently, Caring for Life is being read by the CERN Aotearoa New Zealand group at their monthly Zoom-based meetings.

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