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This article documents two long-standing media projects in the San Francisco Bay area. ‘Voices of the Native Nations’, a community radio program, and the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project (QWOCMAP), training program and film festival, both were based in feminist and decolonial social movements and arose during key media historic moments. I argue that media-in-transition goes beyond a simple consideration of technological changes, and instead includes the complex processes by which emerging groups of social actors claim a specific medium or media assemblage within the space constituted by residual and dominant political and media formations. Media-in-transition includes two different time periods – a group’s emergence within a specific media historic moment or conjuncture of changing movements, residual and dominant political and media ecologies, and media technologies; and the always-in-process ways that these contending groups constitute new subjectivities, media practices and social relations. I conclude by reviewing the legacies of these two projects for contemporary feminist media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes three examples of politico-spatial antagonism in Turkey under rising authoritarianism: (1) the reclaiming of Taksim Square during Workers' Day, Women's Day, and pride marches, (2) the transformation of the courtroom into a space of contestation after the termination of the Istanbul Convention, and (3) the Boğaziçi University silent protests advocating for academic freedom and democracy. Based on these examples, we first demonstrate how sporadic resistances in Turkey appear as "spatial contestations" through appropriating spaces such as parks, university campuses, courtrooms, streets, and other public areas. We then examine how these resistances are reclamations of the plurality of the people against the unitary will of the state. Lastly, we argue that spatial contestations serve as innovative sites for reimagining a new form of relational and spatial politics of care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of how to apply care ethics to institutions and social policies has been much discussed, with recent research expanding the scope of care ethics policy analysis to policy areas that are generally not viewed as 'care related'. This paper seeks to engage with this literature in a critical and constructive way to explore more fully the transformative potential of the ethics of care. In particular, this paper argues that the aforementioned literature uses care ethics to focus on practices of care, as opposed to employing the ethics of care as a critical political theory (Robinson, Fiona. 2018. "Resisting Hierarchies through Relationality in the Ethics of Care." International Journal of Care and Caring XX (xx): 1–13). While such analyses are important, this paper proposes a 'Department of Care' as a thought experiment to demonstrate how the ethics of care, as a critical political theory, allows for a radical critique of institutions and governing norms, and inherently destabilizes the dominant understandings of the purpose, structure, and role of government and public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When we grieve during fieldwork, our grief forms new geographies of knowledge production and emotion. In this article, I use autoethnography to theorize my grief during fieldwork following the death of my sister. I examine grief's methodological implications using the concept of 'grief as method,' an emotionally-inflected practice that accounts for the vulnerability produced by grief. By centering vulnerability, 'grief as method' also urges researchers to consider the practices and politics of 'caring with' our research subjects and caring for ourselves, raising larger questions about the role of care in research. Furthermore, this article demonstrates how grief's geographical features—its mobility, its emergence in new sites and landscapes, and its manifestation as both proximity and distance—shape 'grief as method' profoundly. I examine grief's spatial implications by building on Katz's 'topography' to theorize a 'topography of grief' that stitches together the emotional geographies of researchers, blurring both spatial divisions ('the field' vs. 'the not-field') and methodological ones (the 'researcher-self' vs. the 'personal-self'). If we see grief as having a topography, then the relationships between places darkened by grief come into focus. Moreover, by approaching grief methodologically, we can better understand how field encounters—relationships between people—are forged through grief. 'Grief as method,' in offering a spatial analysis of grief's impact on fieldwork, envisions a broader definition of what engaged research looks like and where it takes place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the challenges of juggling the demands of motherhood in the experience of early career researchers operating in the British neoliberal academy, and discusses opportunities for alliance and resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past few decades, geographies of care have flourished, and have offered important insights into the importance of care in our worlds. This introduction provides a broad review of the literature on care ethics and introduces the key themes evident in this special issue that stretch the empirical and theoretical boundaries of care. In particular, the four papers in this special issue de-emphasize the role of the conventional dyadic care-giving relationships in the home and focus on wider structural power relations within which individual care relations are often formed. Such analysis reveals the workings of hegemonic white masculinity in perpetuating unequal caring and uncaring relations and reminds us that care is not always good or positive; rather care can cause harm and exacerbate violence. While 'care' is often seen as the antidote to resolve the vastly uncaring practices and politics evident across time and scale, this special issue acknowledges that more critical engagement with care ethics and the politics of care are necessary to achieve such a goal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban water scarcity in south-east Australia forces us to engage with how our present centralised public utilities are embedded in our everyday lives, amidst uncertain futures. In the last decades, socio-technical approaches have illustrated how the myth of endless main water supply is made possible by cultures of engineering and plumbing. To extend debates about the cultural dimensions of environmental sustainability, this paper takes an ethnographic approach to understand the processes by which Burmese refugees and migrants who lived with water scarcity pre-migration make water potable post-migration to Australia. With a focus on mapping the material, discursive, spatial and emotional relations that enable the provisioning of potable water, the paper brings into conversation Elizabeth Shove's social practice theory with Elspeth Probyn's emplaced formulation of subjectivity. The adaptive provisioning capacities of people whose lives are immersed in cultures of water scarcity point towards a politics and relational ethics of care underpinned by provisioning and first-person contact. To conclude, these grounded Burmese examples provide an opportunity to employ scenario thinking to imagine alternative drinking water futures for south-east Australian cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article consists of an introductory text and visual essay based on The Drift, a fifty-one-minute film produced by Maeve Brennan in 2017. The Drift traces the shifting economies of objects in contemporary Lebanon. The film follows three main characters: the gatekeeper of the Roman temples of Niha in the Beqaa Valley; a young mechanic from Britel, a village known for trading automobile parts; and an archaeological conservator working at the American University of Beirut. Set amongst Lebanon’s densely layered archaeological and urban sites, it focuses on the desire to reassemble and rebuild, conjuring an image of masculinity and care in a landscape often associated with conflict. These multiple perspectives offer a complex alternative to reductive media representations, providing us with a ‘thicker’ description. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports the challenges of the social cultivation of citizens in the United States. Details on the pains and pleasures of caregiving; Connection between the public and private experiences; Failure of families and traditions on providing moral caregiving and education.