What would it mean to substitute care for economics as the central concern of politics? This anthology invites analysis, reflections and speculations on how contemporary artists and creative practitioners engage with, interpret, and enact care in practices which might forge an alternative ethics in the age of neoliberalism. Interdisciplinary and innovative, it brings together contributions from artists, researchers and practitioners who creatively consider how care can be practised in a range of contexts, including environmental ethics, progressive pedagogies, cultures of work, alternative economic models, death literacy advocacy, parenting and mothering, deep listening, mental health, disability and craftivism. Care Ethics and Art contributes new modes of understanding these fields, together with practical solutions and models of practice, while also offering new ways to think about recent contemporary art and its social function. The book will benefit scholars and postgraduate research students in the fields of art, art history and theory, visual cultures, philosophy and gender studies, as well as creative and arts practitioners.

The path to good care-giving can be challenging, particularly where practices are characterised by crisis, moral panic and cultural complexity. How can we respond ethically when there is pressure to meet targets, work faster and implement quick, short-term fixes? This book offers a solution in the form of slow ethics.

Without an appropriate spiritual care model, it can be difficult to discuss existential questions about death and dying with people who are confronted with life-threatening or incurable diseases. This book offers a simple framework for interpreting existential questions with patients and helping them to cope in end-of-life situations, with illustrative examples from practice. Building on the medieval Ars moriendi tradition, the author introduces a contemporary art of dying model. It shows how to discuss existential questions in a post-Christian context, without moralising death or telling people how they should feel. Written in a straightforward manner, this is a helpful resource for chaplains and clergy, and those with no formal spiritual training, including counsellors, doctors, nurses, allied healthcare workers and other professionals who come into contact with patients in hospitals and hospices.

Beginning with a focus on the ethical foundations of caregiving in health and expanding towards problems of ethics and justice implicated in a range of issues, this book develops and expands the notion of care itself and its connection to practice. Organised around the themes of culture as a restraint on caregiving in different social contexts and situations, innovative methods in healthcare, and the way in which culture works to position care as part of a rhetorical approach to dependency, responsibility, and justice, The Ethics of Care presents case studies examining institutional responses to end-of-life issues, the notion of informed consent, biomedicine, indigenous rights and postcolonialism in care and theoretical approaches to the concept of care. Offering discussions from a variety of disciplinary approaches, including sociology, communication, and social theory, as well as hermeneutics, phenomenology, and deconstruction, this book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in healthcare, medicine, justice and the question of how we think about care as a notion and social form, and how this is related to practice.

Within the arts there is a growing ethical consciousness, both in the way it relates to the larger social, political and economic challenges and in the way it reflects on its own production and distribution mechanisms. This book attempts to describe how artistic imagination can produce new situations, based on the potentials and limits of the individual 'body' within its environment. The first section, Ecosophy, focuses on eco-art practices and how the ethical turn in the arts implies a greater receptivity for the environment we live in. The second section, Caring for the Body, focuses more on dance and the renewed interest in 'the body', both on the level of the individual and on that of the larger 'body politic' of cooperation and collaboration.

'Ethics and the Visual Arts' offers insights on matters as far ranging as art and censorship, cultural globalization, the effect of the Internet on art and artists, and the ethics and role of new media.

To care can feel good, or it can feel bad. It can do good, it can oppress. But what is care? A moral obligation? A burden? A joy? Is it only human? In Matters of Care, María Puig de la Bellacasa presents a powerful challenge to conventional notions of care, exploring its significance as an ethical and political obligation for thinking in the more than human worlds of technoscience and naturecultures. Matters of Care contests the view that care is something only humans do, and argues for extending to non-humans the consideration of agencies and communities that make the living web of care by considering how care circulates in the natural world. The first of the book’s two parts, “Knowledge Politics,” defines the motivations for expanding the ethico-political meanings of care, focusing on discussions in science and technology that engage with sociotechnical assemblages and objects as lively, politically charged “things.” The second part, “Speculative Ethics in Antiecological Times,” considers everyday ecologies of sustaining and perpetuating life for their potential to transform our entrenched relations to natural worlds as “resources.” From the ethics and politics of care to experiential research on care to feminist science and technology studies, Matters of Care is a singular contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary debate that expands agency beyond the human to ask how our understandings of care must shift if we broaden the world.