Matters of care in technoscience: Assembling neglected things

2010/12/07 by María Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa · 1 voice · 30 citations
Computer Science · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Geographies of human-animal interactions #Innovative Human-Technology Interaction #Science Education and Perceptions

paper · doi:10.1177/0306312710380301

openalex publication_date 2010/12/07 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01

Abstract

This paper aims to encourage an ethos of care in the study of science and technology. It starts with a reading of Bruno Latour's notion of'matters of concern' as favouring an awareness of the ethico-political effects of constructivist accounts in STS. Introducing attention to concern brings us closer to a notion of care. However, there is a'critical' edge to care that Latour's politics of things tends to disregard. Drawing upon feminist knowledge politics, I propose to treat matters of fact and sociotechnical assemblages as 'matters of care' and argue that engaging with care requires a speculative commitment to neglected things.

Citations

• Ontological Politics. A Word and Some Questions
• Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern
• Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought
• Hand, Brain, and Heart: A Feminist Epistemology for the Natural Sciences
• Sorting Things Out
• Ontological Politics. A Word and Some Questions

Cited by

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• Beyond awareness: Climate games as invitations to care for the future
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• Making problems: interdisciplinary collaboration and AI ethics
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• Conceptualising ‘materialities of care’: making visible mundane material culture in health and social care contexts
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• Making time for soil: Technoscientific futurity and the pace of care
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• More than meets the eye: Understanding the importance of the materialities of care at the vaccination encounter in Portugal
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• Assisted reproduction: Brazilian heterosexual couples' testimonies on the care of specialists
• Attuning to laboratory animals and telling stories: Learning animal geography research skills from animal technologists
• Infrastructures of care: Ethics in everyday digital media use
• Feminist Cyberlaw
• Mapping Informal Digital Care Practice in Later Life: A Playshop Model
• Making sense of ‘slippages’: re-evaluating ethics for digital research with children and young people
• Equity in Author Order: A Feminist Laboratory’s Approach
• Care, Laboratory Beagles and Affective Utopia
• Integrating Living Organisms in Devices to Implement Care-based Interactions

Discussions

• However, conceding the point that negativity can indeed become like the proverbial hammer to which every problem is a nail, I look to Maria Puig de la Bellacasa's philosophy of care. doi.org/10.1177/ [bsky, 0 points, 1 comments]

Related

• Care in Practice
• Intimate Entanglements : Affects, more-than-human intimacies and the politics of relations in science and technology
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