Unsettled Care: Temporality, Subjectivity, and the Uneasy Ethics of Care

SUMMARY In this introduction, and indeed this special section, we explore care as a morally ambiguous and relationally unstable set of practices. By exploring care over longer temporal frames and across shifting subjectivities and intersubjectivities, we show how enactments of care are often unsettled by the transforming dynamics of relationships across time and often entail a multiplicity of competing affects and aspirations, such as hope and failure, love and resentment, pragmatism and utopianism, and connection and disconnection. We thus suggest an analytic approach to care that questions care as either morally suspect or morally virtuous and instead allows for the compromised, shifting, and ambiguous dimensions of care practices to take center stage.