Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Human Geography
http://phg.sagepub.com/
Landscapes of care
Christine Milligan and Janine Wiles
Prog Hum Geogr 2010 34: 736 originally published online 23 April 2010
DOI: 10.1177/0309132510364556
The online version of this article can be found at:
http://phg.sagepub.com/content/34/6/736
Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com
Additional services and information for Progress in Human Geography can be found at:
Email Alerts: http://phg.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts
Subscriptions: http://phg.sagepub.com/subscriptions
Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav
Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
Citations: http://phg.sagepub.com/content/34/6/736.refs.html
Article
Progress in Human Geography
34(6) 736754
The Author(s) 2010
Reprints and permission:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
10.1177/0309132510364556
phg.sagepub.com
Landscapes of care
Christine Milligan
Lancaster University, UK
Janine Wiles
The University of Auckland, New Zealand
Abstract
The term landscapes of care has increasingly taken hold in the lexicon of health geography. As the complex
social, embodied and organizational spatialities that emerge from and through relationships of care,
landscapes of care open up spaces that enable us to unpack how differing bodies of geographical work
might be thought of in relationship to each other. Specifically, we explore the relation between
proximity and distance and caring for and about. In doing so, we seek to disrupt notions of proximity as
straightforward geographical closeness, maintaining that even at a physical distance care can be socially
and emotionally proximate.
Keywords
caring about, caring for, distance, landscapes of care, proximity
I Introduction
Care and care relationships are located in,
shaped by, and shape particular spaces and
places that stretch from the local to the global.
Geographers thus have the potential to make a
crucial contribution to interdisciplinary debates
around care. A significant number of geographers have engaged with ideas around care, from
a range of discourses and perspectives. This is
important for advancing the subject but it is also
important to explore the threads that connect
these discussions. In our view this undertaking
will facilitate the visibility of this geographical
project beyond the discipline. We believe that
a useful way of capturing the complex spatialities that care and care relationships entail is
through landscapes of care, a term that has seen
growing popularity in recent years. Too often,
however, it is used as a rather loose spatial metaphor with limited attention paid to its potential
Corresponding author:
Christine Milligan, Division of Health Research, Lancaster
University, Bailrigg, Lancaster LA1 4YT, UK
Email: c.milligan@lancaster.ac.uk
736
Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com by iwan saputra on October 1, 2012
737
II Landscapes of care
From cradle to grave, we give and receive care.
It enriches our lives and bolsters our ability to
function successfully. Quite simply, without care
we would fail to thrive. Yet, despite its centrality
to all aspects of our lives, it is remarkable how
marginalized care is (Lawson, 2007). Hence,
before engaging with landscapes of care, we discuss what we mean when we talk about care.
1 Defining care
Care is the provision of practical or emotional
support. Critically, as geographers we must consider whether we should even use the terms care
and care-giving. Some carers see all caring as
work; others strongly resist such a definition,
seeing care less as work and more as something
you just do as part of a reciprocal and loving
relationship (Rose and Bruce, 1995). For others
the term care has become imbued with paternalism reinforcing notions of dependency (eg,
Tronto, 1993; Oliver, 1998; Sevenhuijsen,
1998; Shakespeare, 2006). Within disability
studies, commentators have argued that terminology should move away from care toward
ideas of independence and personal support
(Oliver, 1998; Shakespeare, 2006; Thomas,
2007; Kroger, 2009). While this argument may
be justified, such debates also arise as a
738
738
Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com by iwan saputra on October 1, 2012
739
740
740
Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com by iwan saputra on October 1, 2012
741
742
IV Care-ful geographies:
Citizenship and compassion
We suggest that geographical work informed by
interdisciplinary literatures on an ethics of care
might be usefully conceptualized as care-ful
geographies. In doing so, we posit that there are
subtle but important distinctions between this
literature and related geographical literatures
on the sociospatial and contextual aspects of
giving and receiving care, though both have
drawn from (and contribute to) wider social
science debates. Landscapes of care is useful
because it provides an analytical framework
for connecting these literatures, both recognizing that care as a concept is not limited to
particular spatial locations, contexts or scales,
and refusing to leave it separated into overly narrow realms of the political, social, economic
or health, or care as welfare, institutional or
embodied.
The social and political construction of care
as a gendered concept has received much attention across the social sciences (eg, Finch, 1987;
Graham, 1991; Thomas, 1993; Tronto, 1993;
Twigg, 1989). Care, as both physical and emotional labour, falls disproportionately on women
(Armstrong and Armstrong, 2002). Women also
undertake the bulk of paid care-work, which
is frequently undervalued and underpaid.
Researchers point out that this is reinforced by
political institutional landscapes built around
employment legislation and social support
which underpin normative assumptions of
742
Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com by iwan saputra on October 1, 2012
743
744
744
Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com by iwan saputra on October 1, 2012
745
746
746
Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com by iwan saputra on October 1, 2012
747
748
VI Concluding comments
We set out in this paper to unpack and elucidate
what a landscape of care might look like. While
our final section focuses on health geography,
we have drawn on work addressing care across
a broad spectrum of human geography. Social
and cultural geographers have engaged with care
very much at the level of the body, embodiment
and emotions; but they have also extended the
notion of care to non-human relationships such
as animals or the environment. Social feminist
geographers have for a long time written about
the connections between childcare, work and the
state and how these negotiations shape gendered
power relations and experiences, often working
at the urban and regional scale. Political, economic, environmental and development geographers are increasingly engaging with the ethic of
care in thinking about the redistribution of
resources and reorganizing of institutional
arrangements, often at the global scale as well
as national and institutional scales. This highlights the vibrancy of work around care but, as
we suggested at the outset, if these literatures are
to talk to each other it is important to draw out
the commonalties. Of course the boundaries
between subdisciplines are nowhere near as
clear-cut as this paper might imply indeed we
recognize the messiness between these boundaries. Our concern here has been to find a way
forward, one that draws out the potential points
of contact and overlap in a way that might enable
these overlapping subdisciplinary approaches/
discourses to talk to and connect with each other.
Our project does not seek to elevate the
importance of local or individual understandings
748
Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com by iwan saputra on October 1, 2012
749
750
750
Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com by iwan saputra on October 1, 2012
751
751
Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com by iwan saputra on October 1, 2012
752
752
Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com by iwan saputra on October 1, 2012
753
753
Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com by iwan saputra on October 1, 2012
754
Wiles, J., Allen, R., Palmer A., Hayman, K., Keeling, S. and
Kerse, N. 2009: Older people and their social spaces: a
study of well-being and attachment to place in Aotearoa
New Zealand. Social Science and Medicine 68, 66471.
Williams, A.M. 2001: Home care restructuring at work: the
impact of policy transformation on womens labour. In
Dyck, I., Davis Lewis, N. and McClafferty, S., editors, Geographies of womens health, London: Routledge, 10726.
Williams, A.M. 2002: Changing geographies of care:
employing the concept of therapeutic landscapes as a
framework in examining home space. Social Science
and Medicine 55, 14154.
754
Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com by iwan saputra on October 1, 2012