Introduction

In the popular imaginary, informal care is frequently romanticised. Providing unpaid care to another—a child, a spouse, a parent, a stranger—is applauded as a virtuous and deeply human action. Yet, this work of care is also sanitised, minimised, and pushed to the margins. As the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed, the day-to-day realities of unpaid care provision frequently jar with the rose-tinted ideal (e.g. Muldrew et al. 2021; Wagenaar and Prainsack 2021; Tunstall 2022; Lloyd 2023). Within the social sciences, growing recognition of this discord and of an accelerating ‘care crisis’ (e.g. Dowling 2021; Fine 2012; Williams 2018) is fuelling renewed scholarly interest in the intimate economies and relationalities of (formal and informal) care. Much of this scholarship—diverse and multidisciplinary as it is—advances a more critical conception of care as both an intuitive locus of social value, and a sphere of profound (though not immutable) inequality and injustice.

Care, in its broadest sense, is often taken to refer to “physical and emotional labour” (Conradson 2003, p. 451) carried out on behalf of another. Within such ‘commonsense’ definitions, further delineation is typically made between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ care—the former referring to acts of care carried out in the context of paid employment, and the latter to acts of care undertaken without formal recompense, often in the context of existing social relationships. In both contexts, caring action is generally assumed to be animated and underpinned by caring feelings, whether these arise from the moral disposition of the carer themselves or from the specificities of the carer’s relationship with the intended beneficiaries of their actions. As thus understood, care encompasses both physical acts of rendering assistance (‘caring for’) and internal feelings of concern or commitment (‘caring about’) (Bowlby 2012). As an ideal type, care melds both action and sentiment.

Despite the apparent straightforwardness of such conceptions, theorising care—and understanding the contemporary contours of informal care specifically—is a delicate proposition. As a plethora of social science scholars have argued (e.g. Bom and Stockel 2021; Bubeck 1995; Clement 1996; Gordon et al. 1996; Goodin 1985; Held 2005; Kittay 1999; Tronto 1998; Lynch 2022; Mol 2009; Fine 2007), popular understandings of care gloss over many of its lived complexities. Conceptualisations such as those offered above, partnering action and sentiment, frequently fail to account for dimensions such as care’s exploitative and coercive potential (Williams 2018); the possibility of fragile, fraught, or absence of emotional intimacies (Broom et al. 2016); the existence of relational interdependencies and entanglements that collapse simple binaries between ‘carers’ and ‘care recipients’ (Siira et al. 2019; Molyneaux et al. 2010); and the difficulties sometimes associated with delineating ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ care (Fine 2007; Glucksmann 2005). They also obscure the unpaid care work performed for (and potentially by) non-human animals and environments (Barca 2020).

Our aim in this article is therefore to present an enhanced theoretical scaffolding for informal care, which captures its evolving and enduring nuances. While it is not our intention to develop or advance any one definition of informal care, we begin (in the interests of pragmatism) with a working definition of informal care, adapted from Bernice Fisher and Joan Tronto’s (1990) definition of care more broadly. Informal care, as thus defined, is an unpaid activity “that includes everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our 'world' so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment” (Fisher and Tronto 1990, p. 40). This definition encompasses the intensive and multidimensional labour involved in raising a child or caring for a loved-one at the end of life, but also allows room for the (less recognisable) forms of care involved in advocating for a stranger, being a friend, nourishing one’s own body, or working to revegetate a threatened habitat. Using this definition as a pragmatic jum** off point, the remainder of this article will explore key theoretical resources from across the social sciences to advance a critical and notably interdisciplinary theorisation of informal careFootnote 1 that troubles the narrow assumptions that continue to structure many mainstream renderings. More specifically, we aim to present a high-level overview of five key literatures which—notwithstanding their differing emphases—each contest the reification of informal care as an inherent good, and help to furnish a conception of informal care that both recognises informal care’s social value and underlines its embeddedness in systems and structures of inequality.

Informal (political) economies of care

Recent scholarship on the political economy of care—particularly that informed by critical feminist and Marxist perspectives—sheds light on the ways that informal care has been generated, co-opted, reconfigured, and even absorbed into the mechanisations of capitalism (e.g. Aulenbacher et al. 2018a, b). A key tenet of this scholarship is that informal care entails a distinct paradox. Informal care is a critical pillar for the advancement of our increasingly financialised worlds, yet it is one that operates a shadow economy without representation in GDP or in other mechanisms societies use to account for value. Despite being the infrastructure that drives willingness and capacity for paid labour, informal care is (and has historically been) devalued and unrecognised (Henry 1987; Hallgrímsdóttir et al. 2011). This is most clearly evident in failures to financially compensate the caring activities that are carried out ‘informally’ (often by women) in the home, but pervades the broader scene of formal and informal care. Caring activities, scholars in this area attest, deliver considerable value to those being cared for as well as to societies and economy, yet they are rarely recognised as ‘real work’ deserving of payment (Glendinning and Kemp 2006; Fraser 2022). Informal economies of care thus involve the provision and/or exchange of care without financial return and, very often, at financial loss (to certain individuals). Insofar as financial benefits are generated, these are delivered to other actors within the scene, rather than to carers themselves. This perspective allows consideration of dialectical tensions between formal economy and the shadow economies of informal care. Yet, insofar as it recognises and advances remuneration for unpaid care work, it also invites a problematisation of the ‘formal’/‘informal’ care binary (see Fine 2007, and Glucksmann 2005, for a critique of this dichotomy).

For prominent scholars in this area, the tussle between the formal economy and the maintenance of informal care (Hartmann 1998) is critical to the successful operation of the financialised worlds in which they exist. So much so, in fact, that informal care economies can be seen as fundamental to the structures of financial capitalism. Feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser’s (2022) Cannibal Capitalism, for example, argues that capitalism is not just an economic system but an ‘institutionalised societal order’ (Fraser 2022, p. 24). Within this order, she posits, a clear distinction is maintained between ‘the economy’ and a range of purportedly non-economic social spheres. Yet, it is these very social spheres that underpin and enable economic production. Capitalisms expansion depends on the ‘cannibalisation’ of these (concealed) sources of wealth.

From at least the industrial era onward […] capitalist societies have separated the work of social reproduction from that of economic production. Associating the first with women, and the second with men, they have enveloped reproductive activities in a cloud of sentiment, as if this work should be its own reward—or failing that, as if it need only be paid a pittance, unlike work done directly for capital, which is (in theory) paid a wage on which the worker can actually live. In this way, capitalist societies created an institutional basis for new, modern forms of women’s subordination. Splitting off reproductive labor from the larger universe of human activities, in which women’s work previously held a recognized place, they relegated it to a newly institutionalized domestic sphere where its social importance was obscured, shrouded in the mists of newly invented notions of femininity. And in this new world, where money became a primary medium of power, its being unpaid or underpaid sealed the matter: those who perform essential reproductive work are made structurally subordinate to those who earn living wages for surplus-value generating labor in the official economy, even as the work of the first is what enables the work of the second. (Fraser 2022, p. 46)

The capitalist economy, Fraser notes, ‘free rides’ on “activities of provisioning, caregiving, and interaction that produce and maintain social bonds” (Fraser 2022, p. 45), yet affords them no monetary value.

In this context, the devaluing of informal economies of care can be interpreted as a means of securing hegemonic power structures—often along race and gender lines. That is, the unequal division of care responsibilities functions to exclude some from the intergenerational accumulation of capital and assets, while concentrating power, resources, and wellbeing with others (e.g. Clement 1996; Gilligan 1982; Graham 1991; Poole and Isaacs 1997; Ungerson 1983). Women typically undertake significantly more informal care work than men, with ramifications for their ability to hold (well paid) jobs and be financially independent (e.g. Fine 2012; Mozhaeva 2021). The dominant social perception of women as inherently caring at a bio-social level can be understood, in this context, as a normative construction that offers a convenient rationale for allocating a disproportionate load of care responsibilities to women (Williams 2018; Jenkins 2020; Chambers 2001; Palmer and Eveline 2012) and subsequently reducing their capacity for asset accumulation or income generation. Similarly, the phenomenon whereby wealthier individuals (including women) outsource care responsibilities to others (often people of colour (e.g. Coe 2019)) reproduces socio-economic inequalities in ways that are far from accidental. Informal care therefore emerges as a fraught paradox. On one hand, it is a locus of intuitive cultural value. On the other hand, it is a vehicle of inequality and cultural domination that reproduces patriarchal, class and racial oppression in the service of financialised capitalism.

What these political economic and feminist perspectives reveal is that the everyday undulations of informal care are shaped by histories, social structures, and interpersonal relations which afford differential obligations to be in caring relations (Folbre 2006, 1994; Bittman et al. 2003; see also Fine 2007, on the social division of care). Indeed, a key takeaway from this scholarship is that social, political, and economic structures heavily mediate the content of caring moments—creating needs and normative obligations and inflecting the emotional and material experience of informal care. In addition to a political economy of informal care, we might consequently talk about a moral economy of informal care (cf. Sayer 2000, 2007) and the connections between forms of normativity and dominant (or naturalised) socio-material practices (see also Tronto 2020). This includes how participation in informal care can be deployed (and requested) as a moral commitment and/or coercive cultural form (cf. Sayer 2007). As well as how such moralities create regimes that disallow some emotional expressions (e.g. not wanting to care, or feeling angry, ambivalent or estranged) and compel care (by some) through moralities of shame and blame. As thus understood, the work of informal care does not occur naturally or inevitably in the context of (gendered and racialised) carer’s ‘innate’ caring dispositions, but rather emerges from and functions to reproduce the social, political, and economic hierarchies of our current world. Such emergences include affective pulls and tensions between entanglement and estrangement (Broom et al. 2020).

Affective entanglements of care

Another key literature for comprehending informal care concerns care’s affective dimensions (Ahmed 2004a, b; Lehmann et al. 2019; Read 2022; Clough 2008; Blackman and Venn 2010; Mazzarella 2020). While Marxist-feminist analysis has denaturalised the gender and class structuring of patriarchal capitalism, it has also tended to focus on the expropriation of the physical labour of care, which has placed less emphasis on care’s “emotional, agentic and relational aspects” (Williams 2018, p. 549). The ‘affective turn’ in humanities and social science scholarship, by contrast, has usefully drawn attention to the visceral, autonomous and (often) non-conscious vitalities and intensities that circulate within and between bodies and environments (Dragojlovic and Broom 2018; Stern 2019). This work underlines the embodied and relational nature of emotions, including those that constitute and animate caring relationships. Affect, as conceptualised here, arises “in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon […] in those intensities that pass body to body” (Seigworth and Gregg 2010, p. 1). That is, emotions are seen as sematic, but also as fundamentally relational—creating what Sara Ahmed describes as “the very effect of the surfaces or boundaries of bodies and the worlds” (Ahmed 2004a). For Ahmed (2004a, b), individual subjects are single points in a broader circulation of emotions. This work underlines the emotional and affective complexity of being in (or outside of) care, arguing that caring relationality is assembled and reproduced through what Ahmed (2004a, b) describes as ‘sticky’ associations. Associations, significantly, that bind some people together while separating others.

As intimated above, the affective turn has occurred in relation to concerns about embodiment, which frame care as visceral and sensory. Through this lens, care appears in/as ‘ordinary affects’ (Stewart 2007) such as a “tug at the heart strings” (Nussbaum 2001, p. 325) or a sense of having been moved or touched. Care is an affective state, but it is also active and agentic. Through this lens, the significance of caring feelings lies, in part, in their propensity to animate movement and facilitate particular forms of knowing, acting, or relating (Stewart 2007). The capacity to care is intimately connected with the body’s capacity to affect and be affected, as well as with the body’s existence in a perpetual state of becoming (Blackman 2012; Seigworth and Gregg 2010; Dragojlovic and Broom 2018). To care is to feel and be moved by something at a bodily level. Care or carelessness might be present in the sensations and emotions experienced when passing someone or something, and in the embodied desire to stop or speed up. It might present as a feeling of needing to assist, or a compulsion to disappear when confronted with the other’s suffering. Such visceral pushes and pulls occur across the spectrum of relationships, with their intensities varying.

Lynch and colleagues (Lynch 2022; Lynch et al. 2009, 2021; Cantillon and Lynch 2017) write at length about these affective dimensions of care, emphasising affective inequalities and injustices therein. Echoing key insights from the aforementioned scholarship on capitalism’s parasitic dependency on unpaid care work, Lynch and colleagues argue that inequalities are not only generated via the economic, cultural, and political systems of capitalism, but also via capitalism’s ‘affective system’. The problem of affective inequality, they posit, extends beyond disparities in who is expected to perform the unpaid yet socially and economically indispensable work of providing informal caring—or even who is expected to do the work of generating and performing caring feelings (see Hochschild 2012). Giving and receiving care is also a basic human need, and one that remains unmet in many people’s lives.

Human beings typically have both a need and a capacity for intimacy, attachment and caring relationships. The ability to recognise and feel some sense of affiliation and concern for others is a typical human trait, and everyone needs, at least sometimes, to be cared for. People generally value the various forms of social engagement that emanate from such relations and define themselves in terms of them. Solidary bonds of friendship or kinship are frequently what brings meaning, warmth and joy to life. Being cared for is also a fundamental prerequisite for human development. […] Being deprived of the capacity to develop supportive affective relations of love, care and solidarity, or of the experience of engaging in them when one has the capacity, is therefore a serious human deprivation for most people: it is a core dimension of affective inequality. (Lynch et al. 2009, p. 1)

This understanding of care focusses attention not only to who is made to shoulder a disproportionate ‘burden’ of (physical and/or emotional) care work, but also who is or is not permitted and resourced to act on the human impulse to care. Equally, it asks us to consider “who needs (different degrees of) love, care and solidarity, which is all of humanity at different times” (Lynch et al. 2021, p. 57) and whose care needs are or are not satisfied.

An important aspect of this equation, which is particularly relevant for understanding inequalities in informal care specifically, concerns inequalities in opportunities to give or receive love. Scholars thus talk about ‘love labour’—“the emotional work involved in loving a given person [which] cannot be assigned to another by a commercial or even a voluntary arrangement without undermining the premise of mutuality that is at the heart of intimacy” (Cantillon and Lynch 2017, p. 170). As Sara Cantillon and Kathleen Lynch (2017) explain, research in the neurobiology of attachment attests to the important of emotionally intimate and non-substitutable connections in securing a sense of self and affording ontological stability. To be deprived of love, they conclude, is “a major social injustice” (Cantillon and Lynch 2017, p. 170). Yet, emotions and affects (like other social resources) are not distributed evenly in society, and sticky associations mean that different bodies routinely experience differential opportunities to be in loving relationship. As Hillary McBride (2021) observes, ‘body hierarchies’—including the social devaluation of bodies that diverge from the white, thin, able-bodied ideal, as well as broader social and economic inequalities that map onto bodily differences—mediate access to care, include at the level of primary (loving) relations. Equally, occupying a place of social or economic privilege—for example, by virtue of being male, white, citizen, able-bodied or so forth—may afford some individuals more opportunities to do the affective/meaning work of care (e.g. expressing grief, intimacy, or love) while others are left to do the practical work of caring (e.g. meeting physical needs for hygiene, food, or shelter). This scholarship expands understandings of inequalities in informal care to include not only the need for freedom from the uneven burdens or responsibilities of care, but also for freedom to give and receive care as a basic human need (see Dragojlovic and Broom 2018; Gordon et al. 1996).

This focus on relationality and entanglements—including the ways that people are mutually constituted through their interactions—speaks to the value of care for individual and societal wellbeing. It also enables more nuanced analysis of the complexities of care as a lived and felt experience. Affect scholars note that care can take ambivalent and contradictory forms (Wetherell 2012), and that many injustices have been committed “in its name” (Lynch et al. 2021, p. 57). Simple binaries between care ‘givers’ and care ‘recipients’ have been critiqued for both ignoring interdependencies and reproducing the unequal power dynamics that often inflect care-in-relation. Within and beyond primary relationships, this literature attests, ‘caring’ intentions can easily disintegrate into a fractious moral economy, with care becoming a discursive rationale for counterproductive forms of ‘help’ or intervention (e.g. Lavis et al. 2016; Klein 2020; Darling 2011; Hoggett 2006; Peterie 2023; Peterie et al. 2022). Indeed, care can be coercive, paternalistic, and even cruel (Berlant 2004; Sirriyeh 2018; Lavis et al. 2016). As a practice of binding and/or dividing, care occurs in the context of broader affective worlds, and at times reproduces hegemonic patterns of belonging and/or exclusion. Being able to ‘give’ care may therefore be a privilege while being in receipt of care may be a burden—a reality that challenges much of the empirical scene of informal care analysis and its focus on the ‘costs’ of caring (Molyneaux et al. 2010). This is usefully articulated as an affective tussle of care, with the scene of care creating trouble and tension rather than occupying a neutral moral territory. What this scholarship ultimately advances is a deeper recognition of the ‘messiness’ of care as an embodied entanglement—a scene of normative, affective, discursive relations, in which both the imposition of care and the desire to care are tied to the affective temporalities of the present (Ungerson 1987; Kittay 1999; Parker 1993).

The administration of care and neglect

As we have begun to see, informal care—typically carried out in the ‘private’ of everyday life—exists at the interstices of affect, institutional forms, political landscapes, and economic paradigms. Adding to this picture of intermingling relations, social policy scholars stress that access to tangible and intangible resources—from sick days, to parental and bereavement leave, to welfare safety nets—shapes caring relations and associated inequalities. This critical policy studies literature tends to explore the relationship between what is subsidised by the modern state and how it impacts the interpersonal ‘private’ lives of citizens and residents.

This area of scholarship has very often centred on the contemporary context of neoliberalism (Moss et al. 2006; see also Fine and Glendinning 2005). And, moreover, on the administration of care in the context of a gradual retraction in government supports across the political spectrum (Sevenhuijsen 2000) as neoliberalism bites into historical safety nets. As a political-economic project, neoliberalism is premised on a commitment to market principles as the rightful arbiter of human life (Grady and Harvie 2011). Personal liberty and liberation from government intervention—operationalised through the winding back of the welfare state and the weakening of regulatory frameworks to allow free trade and private entrepreneurship—has been a rallying cry of neoliberal reformers. Within the neoliberal schema, the individual’s core responsibility is “to find means of self-sustenance and not to be ‘assisted’ by society” (Amable 2011, pp. 22–23). Insofar as social supports are available, neoliberal advocates insist that they should not be redistributive, but should rather be governed by the (moral) ideals of hard work and personal responsibility, such that even the provision of aid is embedded in relationships of ‘mutual obligation’ and exchange (Amable 2011). As Hasenfeld and Garrow (2012, p. 301) summarise, neoliberalism “recasts the role of the welfare state by shifting responsibility from state to market and from the collective to the individual”.

From a critical social policy perspective, one of the greatest challenges to informal care in the late 20th and now twenty-first century has been the (attempted) leveraging of community goodwill in efforts to shrink welfare states and (re)assemble care as a private responsibility as part of this neoliberal project (Pickard 2012; Berlant 2004). The contradiction of concurrent retraction (of state) and demands for expansion (of community) have occurred in various countries (e.g. Berlant 2004; Patenaude 2019), but David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ in the UK is frequently evoked as a particularly striking example (Dowling and Harvie 2014). The Big Society Cameron envisaged involved the outsourcing of state support to the ‘shadow state’ (Wolch 1990) of the third sector and, significantly, an emphasis on market-based solutions to social needs (Espiet-Kilty 2016). An often remarked-upon aspect of projects of this kind is their rationalisation of austerity and welfare privatisation through a discursive valorisation of the turn to community-based and volunteer-led care, as well as societal/community entrepreneurship.

The Global Financial Crisis has brought these dynamics even further into focus, triggering new waves of austerity that double-down on dominant neoliberal logics of individualisation and responsibilisation. As Emma Dowling (2021, p. 7) observes in the UK context,

In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, Britain has undergone a deep restructuring, most visible in the extensive austerity measures supposedly geared to enabling economic recovery. The austerity measures implemented post-crisis offloaded more of the cost of care from the state onto individuals, households and communities. There is an emotional dimension to austerity, too. The implementation of such measures affects how people think of themselves and of others and how they seek to act in the world. Austerity measures serve to convince individuals that the only person they can truly rely on is themselves, supported, at best, by their family, and implying a greater reliance on informal support and charity provision. Yet the crisis obscures as much as it allows us to see: austerity measures that offload the cost of care onto the shoulders of the most disadvantaged in society are fuelled less by necessity than by an ideological agenda.

As Dowling’s (2021) analysis makes clear, the turn to community and the family to meet social needs has gone hand in hand with the systematic weakening of supports for caring families, communities, and societies (Hoppania and Vaittinen 2015). Informal caring relations have been ‘lent on’ even more than previously to perform functions hitherto performed by the state, even as they have been derailed through concerted political efforts to remove the state supports that underwrite capacity and willingness to provide (intensive) informal care to begin with (Pickard 2012). As Liz Lloyd (2023, p. 1) observes, “unpaid care is in a particularly perilous situation because with social care policies confined to the margins, unable to attract political attention or economic resource, pressures on unpaid carers with continue unabated”.

The winding back of state support for caring activities specifically (e.g. via parenting and carers payments) has been a frequently emphasised part of this picture, but so too has the broader dismantling of many aspects of the traditional welfare state, including by attaching stringent conditions to the income support payments offered, for example, to people experiencing unemployment and acute financial stress (e.g. Watts and Fitzpatrick 2018; Peterie et al. 2019). Such developments, it has been noted, have coincided with changes in the labour force—such as a shift towards ‘gig’ and ‘disruptive’ economies (Vallas and Schor 2020)—leaving many unemployed and employed workers with few options during key life moments that require high levels of care (death and dying, childbirth, mental health problems etc.). As Watts and Fitzpatrick (2018, p. 100) note in their book Welfare Conditionality, the utilisation of financial ‘sanctions’ against welfare recipients who fail to meet the behavioural conditions associated with their payments has further been implicated in “food insecurity, serious housing problems, disconnection from electricity and phone connections, and inability to secure necessary medical care”, as well as a range of adverse social and emotional impacts. This has served to increase the hardship of individuals and families who are already experiencing financial stress, placing significant pressure on informal care relations.

What this scholarship makes clear is that ‘light touch’ and disciplinary approaches to everyday welfare have done considerable damage to already fragile informal care relations (Pfau-Effinger 2005). As Joan Tronto (2017, pp. 34–35) puts it,

The inadequacy of the neoliberal model of the self-mastered self can only be elided by the move that President Bush made: to locate individuals into a family where they are willing to make sacrifices. However, there is no magic intrinsic to families to provide adequate care; they require material, social and psychic resources to thrive. […] [A]s more care responsibilities are being thrown back on families, their capacity to cope with problems increasingly rests upon their prior market success. This is no way to provide adequate care in society. The interesting new neoliberal response – to call for ‘resiliency’, another personalised trait for co** with misfortune – is now widely investigated in the social sciences as a cure for these neoliberal-induced ills.

Present-day inflationary and cost-of-living pressures will only raise the stakes at the intersections between contracting economies, basic incomes, structural austerity, and willingness to care (Birnbaum 2012). The most vulnerable to these impacts, scholars warn, will be those with the least means, rights and/or assets—a fact that will undoubtedly create heightened care needs within already disadvantaged communities. The individualisation of responsibility through the weakening of welfare safety nets thus creates and perpetuates the conditions of harm that make (crisis-focussed) informal care necessary to begin with. Understood in this way, informal care and associated inequalities represent a problem for and with contemporary social policy and administration.

Spaces and places of care

Recent research in human geography makes several contributions that further illuminate different but critical dimensions to informal caring relations and associated inequalities. Among other important interventions, this work draws attention to the central role of space and place in the practice and politics of informal care (e.g. Bowlby 2012; Cox 2013; Lawson 2007; Milligan and Wiles 2010); it shows that the embodied and affective experience of care is fundamentally shaped by the physical spaces, institutional contexts, political landscapes, and relational and community settings in which care occurs (Power and Hall 2018). Forms of material organisation, city planning, and suburban and rural configurations, for example, enable, disable, or otherwise inflect care at the micro-level. Such spatialities of/to care are in turn shaped by and reflective of the broader social, political, and economic landscape. The turn towards place and space as fundamentally mediating care provides a critical addition to the tools outlined thus far focussing on political economy, critical affect studies, and social policy and administration.

Just as political economy and social policy scholars underline the role of financial resources (including income support payments and associated safety nets) in facilitating or undermining informal care (e.g. Fine 2012; Cantillon and Lynch 2017; Dowling 2021; Tronto 2017), so too do human geographers stress the way that physical spaces shape care relationships, including care inequalities. Scholars emphasising space and place have demonstrated, for example, that rapid urbanisation has changed the everyday realities of informal care by sha** civil society, norms of solidarity, access to green spaces, and formal and informal care infrastructures (Bowlby 2012). Where elderly people may have previously relied on nearby family members for support, the dispersal of families across states and continents means that increasing numbers of older people now lack nearby networks of informal care (Milligan and Liu 2015). Viewed through this lens, the inequalities of proximity thus come to the fore, with, for instance, many young parents now lacking physical access to parents and relatives who might otherwise have assisted with child raising (Bose 2013). Such ‘carescapes’ (Bowlby 2012) alter the context of care, pushing (some) people into formal care institutions such as nursing homes and childcare facilities, while placing care outside the reach of others. Equally, the rise of apartment living and the transience of apartment dwellers in countries like Australia (in part due to the geographic patterning of employment and affordable housing) is resha** the experience of informal care within and beyond the home, particularly vis-à-vis parenting (see Kerr et al. 2018, 2021). As Sophie Bowlby (2012, p. 2106) summarises, “relationships are relations in space and place”; even minor spatial changes such as “the distances separating the dwellings of generations within a family or of the living environments of older and younger people” can subsequently have significant impacts on how relationships are practised. For some care scholars, the provision of appropriate (non-commodified) ‘space to care’ (Care Collective 2020) is therefore an essential element in the curation of more caring communities.

The impacts of spatiality on care are perhaps most evident in the geographical patterning of access to local social and healthcare services, secure employment, safe and affordable housing, and green spaces, among other infrastructures and resources (McEachan et al. 2018). In the context of increasingly marketised and privatised health and social care systems in many countries, services are often concentrated in wealthy urban areas where profit margins are greatest (Kessler 2003). Similarly, residents in some urban locations—particularly economically disadvantaged suburbs and areas with high levels of social housing—experience reduced access to health services (e.g. Malmgren et al. 1996; Rosenberg 2014). These economic and infrastructural shortfalls intersect with other inequalities to produce marked disparities in health outcomes and create additional care needs in some postcodes, all the while transferring the burden of care in these locales from state-funded services to informal carers. Loïc Wacquant’s (2008) concept of territorial stigmatisation adds further detail to this picture of geographically patterned inequality in access to care. Wacquant shows that the ‘taint’ of place is a defining feature of contemporary marginalisation. Indeed, he posits that stigma becomes attached to place, and is “arguably the single most protrusive feature of the lived experience of those trapped in these sulphurous zones” (2008, p. 169). Some institutions—from prisons to mental health hospitals—have similarly been identified as loci of stigma where residents are marked as other. This taint stays with the individual after their release from the institution, as they are denied access to societal markers of decency and self-sufficiency (including, for example, access to a stable home) and instead relegated to other stigmatised spaces such as homeless shelters and half-way houses (Keene et al. 2018). What we see here is that institutional spaces of care and/or coercion embody and reproduce social, cultural, political, and economic hierarchies. Stigma—including the sticky stigmatisation of (some) geographic places—functions as an instrument of control (Tyler and Slater 2018), naturalising (class and race) inequalities and patterning both the need for and the experience of informal (and, indeed, formal) care.

Ecologies of care and kinship

To date, the informal caring literature—much like the care literature more broadly—has been dominated by work on human–human relations. Indeed, even the broad definition of informal care with which we began this article was adapted from a longer definition that conceptualised care as “a species activity” (Fisher and Tronto 1990, p. 40); that is, as “one of the features that makes people human” (Tronto 1998, p. 16). As the care crisis intersects with larger ecological and environmental crises, a growing number of scholars are calling for care scholarship (as well as care practice) to move beyond the bounds of the human to centre ecological and multispecies relations, including inequalities and injustices therein (see, for example, Lynch 2022, on veganism). Such work is often deeply informed by First Nations literatures and practices (e.g. Quinn et al. 2022). Decentring the human, these scholars insist, promises to provide a more panoramic view of the extensive (often unpaid) care work that occurs across societies and species; of the multi-directionality of care; and of the embeddedness of even human–human caring relations in broader ecologies and intergenerational knowledges. These interdependencies have been routinely emphasised within First Nations scholarship on care, as well as within scholarship from the Global South, but, until recently, have received significantly less emphasis in the broader care literature.

The healthy land-healthy people in First Nations-centred scholarship (Burgess et al. 2009) speaks to the critical principle of relationality beyond the human in care, and to the value of collectivities that are rarely fostered in modern societies. The dominating (colonial) concepts of ownership, extraction, and exploitation (of non-human animals, or land and waterways) have decentred the historic and enduring ways that multidimensional care between humans, animals, and ecologies is practiced within First Nations communities. Care, as an ecological concept, grounded in First Nations knowledges, becomes longer (stretching over time) and wider (extending to species, land and waterways). As Whitt et al. (2001, p. 4) explain,

Indigenous responsibilities to and for the natural world are based on an understanding of the relatedness, or affiliation, of the human and non-human worlds, which is best understood in its primary – genealogical – context. Genealogies provide stories of origins. They tell a person, or a people, where and from whom they are descended. In this sense they bind through time, showing how ancestors and descendants course together through a continuous, unfolding history.

Such understandings of care and relatedness ask us to confront the consumption and waste of human cohabitation with other species, and to see our footprint on country. Moreover, thinking about informal caring relations in ancestral, ecological, and multispecies terms means recognising the porousness of the boundaries that divide person, ancestor, descendant, animal, country, ecology, and so on (Barla and Hubatschke 2017). From this viewpoint, care between living human persons can never be simply between these persons. Human relations of care exist within a broader genealogical and ecological context and are necessarily intertwined with the provision or withholding of care to/from others in this broader whole.

In her book Staying with the Trouble, feminist STS scholar Donna Haraway (2016) makes an analogous point about the interdependency of all life using the metaphor of the compost pile.

Critters are at stake in each other in every mixing and turning of the terran compost pile. We are compost, not posthuman; we inhabit the humusities, not the humanities. Philosophically and materially, I am a compostist, not a posthumanist. Critters – human and not – become-with each other, compose and decompose each other, in every scale and register of time and stuff in sympoietic tangling, in ecological evolutionary developmental earthly worlding and unworlding. (p. 97)

As Haraway (2016, p. 100) sees it, no species acts alone—“not even our own arrogant one pretending to be good individuals in so-called modern Western scripts”. She thus argues for a radical recomposition of kin: a recognition of all species as ‘family’, and a parallel extension of care beyond the bounds of the human. Such a reframing promises to radically transform and expand how we think about informal care particularly, as informal care frequently occurs in the context of relational commitments to kith and kin.

For many scholars in the environmental humanities, the ethic of care that animates such calls represents a powerful counterpoint and challenge to the individualistic logics of late capitalism. As Stefanie Barca (2020) observes, economic reproduction depends not only the expropriation of (formal and informal) care work from women, colonised and racialised subjects, but also on the expropriation of the (unremunerated) reproduction undertaken by nature (see also Fraser 2022).

[I]f the nexus between women and non-human nature as co-producers of labour power has been socially constructed through capitalist relations of reproduction, then women’s environmental and reproductive struggles are to be seen as part of the general class struggle. For socialist ecofeminists, this requires disavowing the paradigm of modern economic growth, because the latter has subordinated both reproduction and ecology to production, considering them as means to capitalist accumulation. (Barca 2020, p. 34)

Scholars in this tradition stress the importance of resisting “the master version of modernity by countering the subordination of life to social imperatives of production/accumulation” (Barca 2020, p. 39). Central to this project is “seeing and valuing the forces of reproduction” or—to both echo and expand Fisher and Tronto’s (1990) species-centric definition of care—to make visible the constitutive role the more-than-human plays in ‘maintaining’ and ‘repairing’ our world. A more expansive conceptualisation of (informal) care ensues.

Conclusion

The story of care, as we weave across these fields and foci, becomes increasingly unwieldy. Care is revealed as multivalent in character—reaching across scales and generations, involving evolving (urban) materialities, and having a distinctly more-than-human feel. When we examine informal care in particular, what emerges is a set of enduring and develo** concerns, articulated through often disparate but collectively critical scholarships centred on political economy, affect, policy, space, and ecologies. Despite their often-separate ‘treatment’, these spheres of concern swirl around each other in everyday life, choreographing interpersonal and human–ecological relations. They mediate life in all its forms, rippling unevenly across (certain) bodies, times, communities, and spaces in ways that frequently (re)produce inequality.

Together, the literatures discussed in this article furnish a nuanced conceptualisation of informal care that underlines its uneven and often extractive contours. These literatures reveal informal care as a critical—but frequently exploited and undervalued—pillar of our financialised worlds. As an affective relation and resource that is not distributed evenly in societies. As a ‘private’ (and, increasingly, privatised) activity that is fundamentally dependent on (evaporating) public infrastructures. As a spatial practice that is necessarily shaped by our physical environments and inequalities therein. And a more-than-human relation that spans species, bodies, and generations in ways that make ecological degradation part of this broader scene of troubled care.

Informal care, then, is best viewed as an entangled, temporal, material, multispecies emergence, which requires a sophisticated array of concepts to capture its everyday complexity and avoid reductionism (i.e. to the mere social, to the non-material, to the only-human, to the present, and so on). The conceptual tools we have presented in this article are highly valuable for the window they offer into this complexity and issues of inequality therein. They are also vital for capturing the multidimensional nature of the various and evolving conditions that work against the desire and willingness to care, undermining the vitality of our interconnectedness and, by extension, the future of our social and planetary worlds.