ABSTRACT

In this final chapter, we consider the potential application of caringscapes and carescapes in the arenas of research, policy-making and business. To set the scene for this task, we open with a résumé of key ideas and debates that were introduced in earlier chapters. At the outset of the book, we introduced our ideas on time and space, together with the frameworks of caringscapes and carescapes. We started by accepting the premise that caring interdependency is vital to human flourishing (Paul and Miller 1999, Groenhout 2004). Our understandings, practices and experiences of care change over time and space as we learn about care in a variety of relationships and settings over our lives. A contradiction was identified: informal care is vital to human flourishing but is often taken for granted and marginalised. Drawing on the philosophical, sociological and geographical work of Melucci (1996) and Adam (2000) on time, and that of Hagerstrand (1978), Giddens (1984) and Massey (2002) on space, we offered the notion of the terrain – the imagery of a landscape – one that shifts with changes in life possibilities. Our ideas of movement and flows in time and space provide the basis of the frameworks of:

Caringscapes, which assume that an individual’s practices and emotions of • care are shaped and reshaped over the lifecourse, through the interplay of social processes operating in time and space; and Carescapes, which offer a wider focus on change; change in the policy and • service contexts that impact on the doing of both formal and informal care. In carescapes, we again seek to analyse the ways in which such polices and services are shaped by particular time-space relationships and processes.