“Road care” in Performing Care: New perspectives on socially engaged performance

“Road care” in Performing Care: New perspectives on socially engaged performance, Manchester University Press, 2020, pp. 103-121.

On a most general level, we suggest that caring be viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. (Fisher and Tronto, 1990: 40). The origins of this chapter can be traced to 1990 and two disparate events: the redefinition of a feminist ethic of care by feminist political scientists Berenice Fisher and Joan Tronto and a woman’s encounter with a roadworks scene. Where Carol Gilligan’s (1982) ethic of care challenged the universal morality of patriarchal justice, embracing a feminine, relational voice of care, Fisher and Tronto’s (1990) version extended caring from a human– human to human– environment activity, including world- making and maintenance labours. Understandings of care as a social activity, having influenced practices such as nursing, are now filtering across disciplinary boundaries into such fields as performance and design. The present edited collection picks up that discussion at the care/ performance intersection, weaving a conversation around care and socially engaged performance. We seek to inject another voice – of non- human or more- than- human material ecologies – further expanding Fisher and Tronto’s world care through contemporary post- human and new materialist thinking to explore the potential for affective care in material labours of repair. Emboldened by a post- human new materialist understanding of agency, we suggest that this is not just a species activity, but a labour co-performed by a caring ecology of ontologically diverse agents.