2025/10/02 by Ellen van Holstein · 1 voice
Health Professions · Social Sciences · #Community Health and Development #Community and Sustainable Development #Interprofessional Education and Collaboration
paper · doi:10.1080/00049182.2025.2583772
openalex publication_date 2025/10/02 · openalex created_date 2025/11/20 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
This paper demonstrates what it takes to bring people together in collectives to change how care is practised. It does this by conceptually untangling caring with from care infrastructure and by bringing the interplay between the concepts in relief. Recent geographical contributions have developed caring with to conceptualise how socio-material circumstances shape caring capacity in uneven ways. This use of caring with risks conflating it with the concept ‘care infrastructure’ which serves a similar purpose. The paper demonstrates that there is analytical advantage in treating caring with separate to infrastructure as this distinguishes circumstances that support care from deliberation about and changes to the practices of care. The analysis shows how local governments create collectives by providing social infrastructure and how these collectives in turn facilitate a renegotiation of caring responsibilities. The findings presented in this paper indicate that in offering infrastructure that provides meeting places and connections with external organisations and government departments, providers of social infrastructure lay the foundations for caring with and creates opportunities for people to reimagine and renegotiate how they practise care.