Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (review)

In a moment of ecological destruction and species extinction on a grand scale, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa speculatively explores possibilities of care in multispecies and diverse worlds. Matters of Care is ambitious and successful, as Puig de la Bellacasa extends both feminist care ethics and science and technology studies (STS) understandings of the relational complexity of more than human worlds. Part 1 of Matters of Care extends the work of Donna Haraway, Joan Tronto, and Bruno Latour as Puig develops a philosophical framework and ethics of care capable of challenging dominant technoscientific productionist ways of thinking and acting. Puig argues for the importance of caring as well as possible in a complicated material present shaped by imperfect histories and uncertain futures. Part 2 turns to contemporary soil science and permaculture movements to illustrate the power of care as an everyday doing—Puig stresses the ordinary acts of caring for soils as having the potential to challenge dominant notions of "care time" as unproductive. For those unfamiliar with care ethics and STS, Matters of Care might be a challenging read—but her challenge to dominant productionist ways of thinking and doing provides an opportunity to think with livable futures in a troubling historical moment.

In chapter 1, "Assembling Neglected 'Things,'" Puig cleverly suggests the importance of "matters of care" (MOCa) as she extends the usefulness of Latour's "matters of concern." Puig's argument is additive because care brings something new to concern—care "contains a notion of 'doing' that concern lacks" (p. 42). For Puig, care signifies a "transformative ethos rather than a normative ethics" (p. 67), and care is always noninnocently practiced within broader sociotechnical assemblages. Caring requires more than assembling concerns because caring encourages ethical and political involvement in the situations those performing care find themselves. As Puig writes, "Care joins together an affective state, a material vital doing, and an ethico-political obligation" (p. 42). Thus, MOCa extends the feminist practice of politically engaged scholarship by providing tools for feminists to consider the types of care being done in situated contexts and examine the unequal ways in which care is received in multispecies worlds.

Chapter 2, "Thinking with Care," continues the process of focusing in on Puig's notion of care as she writes of Haraway's influence on her thinking. Of particular importance, according to Puig, is Haraway's "resistance to normativity, both moral and epistemological" (p. 71). Puig connects a nonnormative approach to the care ethics of Joan Tronto as Puig stresses the importance of multispecies caring as a practice situated within historical and naturalcultural relationalities. In webbed practices of care, humans are not the only species that matter.

Chapter 3, "Touching Visions," discusses the ambivalent possibilities of "touch" in "caring knowing." Touch, of course, challenges the dominant metaphor of vision in knowledge making in the West. Building on Haraway and Karen Barad, Puig writes, "The intra-active but non-bilateral reciprocity of touching with care for the touched, thinking touch through care and as sensory values, invites us to distribute and transfer ethicality through multilateral asymmetrical agencies that don't follow unidirectional patterns of individual intentionality" (p. 122). In other words, the combination of touching and caring provides a speculative framework that encourages knowledge making practices capable of constructing and representing relational assemblages of more than human agencies.

In contrast to the abstract and theoretical contributions drawn from Puig's training as a philosopher in part 1, part 2 explores contemporary soil science and permaculture movements to think speculatively about possibilities of caring worlds. Chapter 4, "Alterbiopolitics," challenges dominant Western ethical regimes by criticizing the normalizing and disciplinary effects of contemporary humanist ethics that situate responsibility in the bounded individual human body. Employing a relational ontology, she uses permaculture as an example of a "doing" to reveal the ways ethical obligations are recreated through everyday practices of "living communities" (p...