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The global pandemic exposed many flaws in the gendered political economy. It also illuminated how essential care is to our economy and to our flourishing. Yet, when care is dependent on a capitalist system that relies on competition, there will always be people who receive care and those that will not. In such a system, care is wrongly perceived to be a "choice" one can opt into or out of. This short essay grapples with the discourse of care as a choice, particularly around reproductive decisions. Choices offered within a neoliberal market logic fail to understand the political relationalities of such choices. Drawing on my personal experience of an abortion and other examples from the first year of COVID-19, this essay demonstrates how little choice there is in matters of care; care connects and disconnects one another regardless of personal choices. If matters of care persist in the realm of the market reliant on rational economic autonomous actors, then the many interrelationalities of care that the pandemic exposed will not have any impact on attaining a more caring society. This is particularly important given the nature of abortion politics in the United States. I argue that abortion is health care, and is often the most caring decision a pregnant person can make for the world they are trying to maintain, continue, and repair (per Tronto 1993). Care is not a choice; it is fundamental to human society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Campaigns for personal health expenses make up the largest and fastest-growing segment of donation-based crowdfunding. Set against the backdrop of retrenchment and disinvestment in public healthcare systems across the global North, health-related crowdfunding is a way to navigate increasingly marketised systems of social reproduction. Despite high profile success stories, campaigns vary significantly in their ability to capture the hearts, and ultimately wallets, of donors. While existing analyses of online campaign pages offer some insight into the marketing of healthcare needs, far less is known about practices and experiences of crowdfunding platform users, including campaigners. Bringing literature on crowdfunding together with accounts of the marketisation of care, our paper asks: how do campaigners work to secure crowdfunded healthcare? Through the accounts of 15 people campaigning on behalf of family or friends in Aotearoa New Zealand, we show how attempts to appeal to donors depend on campaigners' abilities to 'market' illness and need in ways that resonate with the crowd. We have two main foci. First, we examine the responsibility and responsibilisation of campaigners to engage and perform accountability to crowdfunders. Second, we show how campaigners mobilise recipients' traits of deservingness and other culturally favoured personal qualities to appeal to the crowd's perceived predilections. In sum, the paper demonstrates how the use of crowdfunding is both necessitated by the marketisation of healthcare while simultaneously exerting its own form of market discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the entanglements of love and cruelty in the publicity of the 2018 wedding of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex. We suggest that the wedding failed to inch closer toward a 'post-racialized' society. Rather, the wedding and public (but superficial) embracing of Markle promoted a 'comfort feminism' which obscured the mundane white supremacy and sexism of modern Britain. The paper concludes with a brief afterward which discusses the legacy of the royal wedding in the context of the social, political, and cultural challenges wrought by the intersections of the global pandemic and structural racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While 'the home' is omnipresent within studies of home-located work, the physical or material qualities of the home tend to be positioned as a stable setting within which occupants manage the social complications of home-work. By contrast, we discuss how domestic materialities play a dynamic role in home-work, and how these materialities are mediated by specificities of tenure, household type, dwelling size and other factors. Bringing literature on home-located work into conversation with studies of domestic materialities, the paper draws on interviews and focus groups involving 11 female entrepreneurs working from their homes in Aotearoa New Zealand. Through discussion of participants' negotiations with the functionality and aesthetics of their homes, the paper shows how domestic materialities actively shape, in enabling and restricting ways, the practice and experience of home-located work, while keeping sight of how such materialities are patterned by household characteristics and housing market conditions. The paper offers topical insights as people and employers grapple with the normalisation and relative (un)viability of home-located work post-Covid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite sustained scholarly attention on care ethics across the social sciences, little attention has been paid to the politics of care practiced in the Western academy. In this provocation, I bring care ethics into dialogue with critical pedagogy to explore seemingly benign caring practices in the university. I draw on analyses of 'false hope' to provide a framework to better identify and nuance examples of 'care' throughout universities. While some caring practices in the academy may provide opportunities for resistance to its neoliberal corporatisation, I argue that examples of 'false care' and even uncaring practices can simultaneously flourish. More attention is needed by care scholars to unpack and untangle fraught caring relations throughout the academy in order to help our universities become more caring, equitable and inclusive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical care ethics argues that care's political potential lies in its relationality. Geographic scholarship on relationality can provide an avenue for unpacking the politics of care. This paper explores how a spatial relational care approach illuminates how caring agencies occurring in particular places have political reach to people and places well beyond those initial sites. A spatial relational care approach seeks to bring visibility to the diversity of caring and non‐caring relationalities that occur between multiple people, places, events, times and structural underpinnings. Such geographic relational scholarship on care brings attention to the ways that people and places are non‐autonomous through caring relations. This paper suggests that the frameworks of topological polis and intimate geopolitics can extend our relational understandings of care and offer insights into aspects of social life that care research has yet to explore. Empirically, this paper draws on a high‐profile campus sexual assault case to argue that the spaces of care need to be understood beyond where the initial care act took place, that responding to care creates relational poleis and that the site of the body is relationally bound with care and violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aotearoa New Zealand is a nation of promise, potential and enigma: it was the first country in the world where women gained the vote in 1893 and now boasts the youngest woman world leader in 2017. It is also a postcolonial nation where structural racism, homophobia, and sexism persist, yet it has also given legal personhood to a river. Our Country Report foregrounds Aotearoa New Zealand feminist geographic scholarship that responds to, reflects, and sometimes resists such contrasts and contradictions at the national scale. We employ the lens of the 2017 national election to critically engage with current gendered and indigenous politics in the country. Analyzing these politics through three 'feminist moments,' our paper highlights the breadth and scope of current Aotearoa New Zealand feminist geographic scholarship and directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]