Working with care: embodying feminist care ethics in regional coworking spaces.

This paper extends knowledge on the emotional and social labour of coworking founders. It does so from a cultural geographical perspective by asking how this labour intimately affects coworking founders' everyday lives and introducing feminist care ethics to reflect on it. The paper shows how this conceptual framework helps to shed light on the effects, the temporality, and the ambivalence of this labour. The everyday practices of two coworking founders, Paul and Rachel, are understood through ethnographic fieldwork based on feminist geographical methodologies and conducted in a small regional town in Victoria, Australia. From these understandings, the paper argues that the everyday coworking practices of regional coworking founders are caring practices, aimed to maintain, continue, and repair a hospitable atmosphere in the space. Furthermore, it argues that these caring practices are ambivalent and limited, as they can have negative effects on the wellbeing of the coworking founders. Three impressionistic vignettes trace these effects, including exhaustion, discomfort, and resentment. The paper concludes with three suggestions for policy on regional innovation, for coworking research, and for research on feminist care ethics. These include the need for 1) more attention to the effects of care and coworking practices; 2) more focus on the temporality of such practices to better understand their sustainability; 3) increasing research on the intersection between regionality and care, thus inviting research on "cities of care" to also direct its attention to regional areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]