Care in Practice

This collection asks what it means to treat care as an ongoing process of adjusting and improvising. Instead of framing care mainly as warm connection between people, the contributors put objects, devices and physical surroundings at the centre of their analysis, even though these are often imagined as cold and impersonal. The aim is not to pit care against technology but to rethink both so they can be studied together.

On this view, technology is no neat instrument that simply obeys its user. It moves, shifts and responds in unexpected ways, and in care settings everything from equipment to routines must be repeatedly reworked. The knowledge that guides care is likewise unsettled. The authors treat it as a range of situated knowledges rather than a fixed body of general rules, and they show that these knowledges must change as much as the tools, bodies, people and everyday lives they meet.

The book is written for readers interested in health care, science and technology studies, and the philosophy of practice. Its author, Annemarie Mol, is a Dutch anthropologist and philosopher known for her work on care and the body.