Matter of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa

A book I return to for its insistence that care is not simply a feeling or virtue, but a material, political practice that shapes what becomes possible in more-than-human worlds.

I’m reading Matters of Care as part of my ongoing thinking about how ethics becomes lived in everyday educational life. Puig de la Bellacasa offers language for taking care seriously, not as something soft or private, but as something that is made and negotiated in the thick of relationships, infrastructures, and more-than-human entanglements.

One of the book’s enduring provocations is that care is never neutral. Care can sustain, repair, and hold things together, but it can also exclude, demand, and unevenly distribute responsibility. This attention to the politics of care matters for education, where “care” is often invoked as self-evident while the conditions that make caring possible (time, labour, support, recognition) remain precarious.

I’m also drawn to the book’s speculative orientation. Rather than treating ethics as a fixed code, it encourages an ethics of staying with questions: What becomes possible when we take interdependence seriously? What kinds of obligations do we inherit, and which ones do we refuse? What does it mean to care in ways that are accountable to difference, power, and the more-than-human worlds that sustain us?

For early childhood education, this book helps me name care as a curriculum question. Care shows up in routines, materials, food moments, documentation, and everyday decisions about what (and who) gets noticed. It invites educators to ask not only “Are we caring?” but “What forms of care are being organized here, for whom, at what cost, and with what possibilities for living well together?”

Questions I’m sitting with:

• Where does care become taken-for-granted in education, and what disappears when it does?

• What conditions make caring practices possible, and who carries that labour?

• How might we practice care as an ethical stance that includes more-than-human worlds, without turning it into a slogan?

If you’ve read this book (or are reading it now), I’d love to hear what you found generative, difficult, or worth returning to.