ABSTRACT
This chapter is about care and its entanglements with infrastructural relations. Infrastructural relations have been described as involving the ‘boring’ things of care – guidelines, institutional protocols and practices, ways to organize space and time and bodies, and the forms of life that become possible therein. The idea we attend to here is that ‘care’ doesn’t just happen, and is not only, or perhaps even primarily, an effect of knowledge, values or ethical thinking. Using a philosophical practice of theorizing from empirical instances, the authors use stories about care in the community for people living at home with dementia to open up taken-for-granted ideas about care in ways that show its material politics. The authors consider the relations through which care is produced, how it travels and how it is shaped within infrastructural relations, and how these arrangements and relations have world-making effects for all those involved.
