Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2012) ‘“Nothing comes without its world”: Thinking with care’, The Sociological Review, 60(2), pp. 197–216.

Puig de la Bellacasa’s article argues that care is not merely a moral sentiment or private virtue, but an ontological condition of thinking, knowing and living in interdependent worlds. Drawing especially on Donna Haraway’s work on situated knowledge, relationality and feminist technoscience, the article proposes “thinking with care” as a practice of knowledge-making that recognises that nothing exists or is known in isolation: every object, concept, body or theory arrives with a world of relations. Care is therefore understood as affect, ethical obligation and material labour, but also as a demanding practice that sustains relations without idealising them. Puig de la Bellacasa develops three central movements: thinking-with, which resists the fantasy of the solitary thinker and foregrounds collective, relational knowledge; dissenting-within, which allows disagreement inside communities of thought without abandoning responsibility to them; and thinking-for, which addresses the risks of speaking for marginalised others while still insisting on accountable forms of solidarity. The article is especially important because it refuses sentimental versions of care: caring relations can involve conflict, exploitation, anxiety and asymmetry. Yet this difficulty does not make care dispensable; rather, it makes care essential to any responsible epistemology. Ultimately, Puig de la Bellacasa concludes that knowledge practices must attend to the worlds they help compose, asking not only whether claims are accurate, but how they sustain, damage or transform relations. Thinking with care is therefore a feminist, relational and political mode of knowing.