Haraway's work dislocates the centrality of the human in favour of the in/non/posthuman and of bio-centred egalitarianism. In fact, what we call a 'body' is a multispecies crowd if we consider that human genomes can be found in only about 10 per cent of cells, while the other 90 per cent of the cells are filled with the genomes of bacteria, fungi and other tiny messmates. And she concludes by saying that 'to be one is always to become with many' (Haraway, 2008b: 3). The image of the companion species (Haraway, 2008b) links to the idea of otherworldly conversation (Haraway, 2008a), in which various non-human entities participate as subjects. Her work 'calls for a renewed kinship system, radicalized by concretely affectionate ties to nonhuman "others"' (Braidotti, 2006: 199). And in fact, Braidotti (2013) proposes using the term 'more-than-human' instead of 'non-human' to overcome the human/non-human dichotomy.

Yet the most striking messing up over categories into which Haraway's thinking-with has drawn her readers, is that of inciting us to enlarge our ontological and political sense of kinship and alliance, to dare in exercises of category transgression, of boundary redefinition that put to test the scope of humanist care. Welcome to a 'menagerie of figurations', a 'critical-theoretical zoo' where all 'inhabitants are not animals' (Haraway and Goodeve, 2000: 135–6). Kinships and alliances become transformative connections – merging inherited and constructed relations. This one was never an evident gesture. Promiscuous gatherings might provoke unease. I have seen concerned feminists fairly irritated with Haraway's suggestion that we connect with our machines. On the other hand many techno post-feminists would rather detach the celebrated cyborg from attachments supposed to be essentialist, realist, Second Wave, spiritual or any other term sounding misplaced. Look at how the extremely quoted final sentence of her celebrated Cyborg Manifesto , 'I'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess', has been systematically disconnected from the preceding words affirming that both figures are 'bound in the spiral dance' – a characteristic ritual of neo-pagan activist spirituality for which the figure of the Goddess is central (Starhawk, 1999). More recently there is some urge to split her serious work from that stuff she has been writing about dogs! What is both challenging and rejoicing with Haraway's thinking is that it renders such splits difficult to sustain.

The way in which Haraway writes is a semiotic technology of these agitations: connective writing, phrasing worlds together, contributes to this generative drive. In these incessant web-making moves, ontology is continuously in the making, in the process of becoming-with. For Haraway, 'reality is an active verb' (Haraway, 2003: 6). This does not mean that there are no boundaries or stabilities but that 'beings do not preexist their relations' (Haraway, 2003: 6). 3 In that sense, with Susan Leigh Star, Haraway sees 'objects' as 'boundary projects' (Haraway, 1997: 6).

Grounded on a conception of care as an ontological requirement of relational worlds, this essay seeks to explore what the doings of thick and non-moralistic ways of caring could mean for practices of thinking and knowing. Even though the theme of care has not explicitly appeared in her writings until recently – in different yet related ways to the ones I explore here (Haraway, 2007b, 2007a) – I have found Donna Haraway's work particularly inspiring for thinking caring knowledge as a relational force, while resisting to fall into moralistic visions (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2004, 2012). For Haraway, creating knowledge is a relational practice with important consequences in the shaping of possible worlds. Generically speaking, the claim that care matters in knowledge is supported by Haraway's call to pay attention to the workings and consequences of our 'semiotic technologies' – that is, to practices and arts of fabricating meaning with signs, words, ideas, descriptions, theories (Haraway, 1991c). However my motivation is not so much to offer an 'interpretation' of Haraway's vision of 'situated knowledge', but to offer a speculative reading of her work that reveals new challenges for the notion of care.

I read Haraway's stance against 'political and ontological dualisms' as a continuation of these conversations. The affirmation of the political potential of valuing the world of sticky mediations as a thinking device is prolonged in her generic refusal of purity : 'The point is to make a difference in the world, to cast our lot for some ways of life and not others. To do that, one must be in the action, be finite and dirty, not transcendent and clean' (Haraway, 1997: 36). In her most recent work on interspecies relationalities, Haraway has explored the predicaments of caring for non-humans in a nature-cultural world (Haraway, 2007b). But the impurity of caring was at the heart of a question asked more than decade ago, 'Which is my family in this world?' (Haraway, 1997: 16; 51), when she was trying to think with a transgenic rodent, Oncomouse™, produced to serve research on breast cancer. Caring for this mouse is a weird experience; at least the way Haraway told her story cut dry any temptation of sentimentalism: named both a 'she' and an 'it', her specious boundaries are impure, she lives in labs but she is not a mechanical device, she suffers, but she is not 'just' a collateral effect of the experimental setting; she was serially born-produced to suffer. By dying or surviving Oncomouse™ was supposed to prove what type of being cancer is. But by thinking-with Oncomouse™'s life with a feminist perspective, by asking questions such as 'for whom Oncomouse™ lives and dies?', Haraway's testimony – illustrated with Lynn Randolph's effective portrait of a naked martyr mouse wearing a crown of spines and under constant observation in a peep-show lab – also proved something unexpected: our sister mouse was born to play a part in what Lochlann Jain calls the Cancer Complex , a world where a wealthy business of health care feeds on the pacified scandal of cancer and where some bodies deserve the dollars of costly health care

Telefol women, according to MacKenzie, place great value on the standardisation of their looping techniques, since this is a way of confirming tribal identity (1991: 103). But I would contend that this standardisation is not brought about, as MacKenzie claims, by conformity to rules. Indeed there appear to be no rules, beyond general exhortations of the kind delivered by the mother to her daughter in the case described above, or vague 'rules of thumb' that help prepare the practitioner for her impending activity but in no way determine its course (Suchman 1987: 52). Like most commonplace practical skills, such as tying shoelaces in Western society, looping resists codification in the form of generative rules or algorithms (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1987). One becomes aware of this simply by looking at the elaborate diagrams, accompanied by written commentary, by means of which MacKenzie attempts to explain the step-by-step procedure for open-spaced looping (pp. 83–99, and for an example, see Figure 19.1). Though these diagrams are admirable for their intended purpose, of ethnographic description, any attempt by the untutored reader to follow them in practice would likely lead to the same kind of tangle that the inexperienced Telefol girl produces, on secretly attempting to carry on with her mother's work. It would be quite mistaken to suppose that anything remotely equivalent exists in the native mind. But if standardisation does not follow from the application of rules, how are we to account for the persistence of technique from one generation to the next?

All the points I have made about skill, in the previous section, apply to the making of string bags. Apart from the maker's body – and especially her fingers – the only tools used are the mesh gauge ( ding ), made from a strip of leaf, to maintain the constancy of the mesh in an open weave (see Figure 19.1), and the needle ( siil ), made of bone, which is needed for making tightly looped baskets without the use of the gauge (MacKenzie 1991: 73). But in use the needle or the gauge, along with the fingers that hold it, are as much a part of the user as they are used. Moreover the accomplished bilum -maker does not experience the movements of her body as being of a mechanical nature. Far from answering to commands issued from a higher source, they carry their own intentionality, unfolding in a continual dialogue with the material. Telefol people liken this movement to the flowing water of a river. Thus the body-in-use is not moved, like a rigid object,

but rather becomes one with the flow (p. 102). However, in order to maintain the evenness of the string, in spinning, or of the weave, in looping, it is necessary to make continual adjustments in the course of the movement itself. 'By adolescence', MacKenzie writes, 'all girls have mastered the technique of spinning, gaining visual acuity in selecting equal assemblages of filaments during the roving process; and a sensitivity or balance in the amount of pressure applied between palm and thigh during the rhythmic plyng motion' (p. 76). As this passage clearly reveals, dexterity in spinning depends on the fine-tuning of visual as well as haptic perception. And it is equally clear that the form of the bilum is an emergent outcome of rhythmically repeated, controlled movement in the processes of spinning and looping.

From MacKenzie, Androgynous Objects: string bags and gender in central New Guinea , published by Harwood Academic, 1991, pp. 86–7.

Of string bags and birds' nests: skill and the construction of artefacts 349

different view prevails, and this has led to the positing of a great sensory divide between visual perception on the one hand, and auditory and tactile perception on the other, and with it, between Western societies in which the former allegedly dominates, and non-Western societies which are said to be given over to the latter. My aim, now, is to replace the orthodox, speculative notion of vision with a participatory or existential one. Once this is done, the 'great divide' simply vanishes.

Among the techniques of sociocultural production historically informing the glance have been the marketing of models of the 'ideal home', for example through images prescribed by the Ideal Home Exhibition, and the realization by speculative builders of the dreams thus created (Chapman and Hockey, 1999). The new inhabitants of 1930s semi-detached suburbia in Britain wanted to show their family, neighbours and friends that they had 'arrived' in a new social world, through the conspicuous display of their affluence. As Veblen (1934: 30–31)

The fraught knottings of life mean that while this work is imperative to sustain life, it matters whose life, what is repaired and cared for, and how it is practised. Instead of allowing maintenance and repair work to be outsourced and black-boxed as infrastructural labour, recognising and redistributing care work would mean a more equitably dispersed responsibility to each other and to the earth. Given our ontological entanglements, care entails "thick, impure, involvement in a world where the question of how to care needs to be posed. That is, it makes of ethics a hands-on, ongoing process of re-creation of 'as well as possible' relations and therefore one that requires a speculative opening about what a possible involves" (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017:6). Thinking repair work as care work in the Capitalocene does not presume that either things or people's relationship to them are returnable to some originary, untarnished state. This is Maria Puig de la Bellacasa's speculative ethics: that ethics are not only always situated but that we must reflect on the speculative horizon of what it means to live as well as possible in our current socio-ecological conjuncture.

This essay seeks to give philosophical expression to the vitality, willfullness, and recalcitrance possessed by nonhuman entities and forces. It also considers the ethico-political import of an enhanced awareness of "thing-power." Drawing from Lucretius, Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, and others, it describes a materialism of lively matter, to be placed in conversation with the historical materialism of Marx and the body materialism of feminist and cultural studies. Thing-power materialism is a speculative onto-story, an admittedly presumptuous attempt to depict the nonhumanity that flows around and through humans. The essay concludes with a preliminary discussion of the ecological implications of thing-power.

Markets in commodity futures revolve around a large number of transactions involving contracts to buy and sell commodities, at future dates. This trade in contracts is a paper trade, which rarely involves actual exchanges of the commodities themselves between traders. Like the stock market, these markets are speculative tournaments, in which the play of price, risk, and exchange appears totally divorced, for the spectator, from the entire process of production, distribution, sale, and consumption. One might say that speculating in commodity futures makes a dramatic separation between price and value, with the latter of no concern at all. In this sense, the logic of trade in

The images used to promote the Granville project show the giant worm farms housed in a shed. There is lots of engineering in evidence: conveyor belts to move and spread the mix, trays and another conveyor system to collect the castings, which are then stabilized and sold as agricultural fertilizer. This is a potent example of how nature is always differentially mixed into culture. All this technology doesn't diminish the great significance of the work being done by those worms as they facilitate transition. In those giant industrial worm farms heightened life and heightened death go together ; the profound interconnections between destruction and renewal are everywhere evident. Perhaps this system exemplifies what Phillips calls "the ordinary sublime." He uses this term to explain the difficulties Darwin had accounting for experiences of things that overwhelm and overawe us once God drops out of the picture.

just speak to a deep anxiety about boundaries collapsing, to a sense of mourning for the archaic value of the ocean, it also gave voice to an array of alternative strategies for managing shit.

I want to tell some worm stories now that show the arts of transience in action. My aim is to think about their ethical significance, to reflect on how they alter ways of living and embodiment. How have worms been deployed in a politics of active experimentation with waste?

Kafka's "Cares of a Family Man" is a less scientific depiction of the power of things to mobilize and re-form. The protagonist, Odradek, is a spool of thread who/that can run and laugh. As animate wood , Odradek is the result of a "spontaneous structural generation" (to use De Landa's phrase). Like a soliton, this particular mode of matter-energy resides in a world where the line between inert matter and vital energy, between animate and inanimate, is permeable—and where all things, to some degree or other, live on both sides.

it looks like a flat star-shaped spool of thread, and indeed it does seem to have thread wound upon it; to be sure, these are only old, broken-off bits of thread, knotted and tangled together, of the most varied sorts and colors. . . . One is tempted to believe that the creature once had some sort of intelligible shape and is now only a broken-down remnant. Yet this does not seem to be the case; . . . nowhere is there an unfinished or unbroken surface to suggest anything of the kind: the whole thing looks senseless enough, but in its own way perfectly finished. 15

Theories of practice have roots stretching at least as far back as Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Whilst Wittgenstein does not write directly about 'practices', his work conveys many of the key features of theories of practice. For Schatzki (1996), Wittgenstein's location of intelligibility and understanding, not within discrete human minds but in the flow of praxis, and his articulation of how intelligibility and understanding structure of human action and the social realm provides a basis for a theorization of practices which recognizes that 'both social order and individuality ... result from practices' (1996: 13). Heidegger, in Being and Time (1962), identifies praxis, as much as language, as a source of meaning. His account of Dasein and its relation to human activity and to equipment resonates with the ontological grounding of theories of

Heidegger clearly wants to embrace robust realism, for he exceeds the limits of deflationary realism when he writes: '[T]he fact that reality is ontologically grounded in the being of Dasein, does not signify that only when Dasein exists and as long as Dasein exists, can the real be as that which in itself it is' (Heidegger, 1962:255, my italics).

already in Being and Time , that without Dasein there would be no before and after. But Heidegger also says in a lecture given in 1928 and published in 1978: 'The question of the extent to which one might conceive the interpretation of Dasein as temporality in a universal-ontological way is a question which I am myself not able to decide—one which is still completely unclear to me' (Heidegger 1984: 210). I think Heidegger should have realized that the occurrent time of nature escapes idealism since it can be understood not in terms of our everyday sense of a before and after but only as an asymmetrical ordering of states.

Of course only as long as Dasein [human being] is (that is, only as long as an understanding of being is ontically possible), 'is there' being. When Dasein does not exist, 'independence' 'is' not either, nor 'is' the 'in-itself' (Heidegger 1962:255).

Like Davidson, Heidegger answers the skeptic by showing that our practices and the everyday world are inextricably intertwined. Indeed, he argues at length that 'Dasein is the world existingly' (Heidegger 1962:416). 4 Moreover, Heidegger seems to agree with the deflationary realists that, while entities show up as independent of us, the being or intelligibility of entities depends on our practices. So any talk of things in themselves must be put in scare quotes. Thus, Heidegger says of natural entities:

Heidegger famously analysed human existence as being-in-the-world, which he interpreted more expansively as projecting, thrown being-amid entities. Projection, thrownness and being-amid are, respectively, the future, past and present dimensions of human activity. Projection is acting for the sake of a way of being or state of affairs. Most of the time a person acts for the sake of something, and in doing so she comes towards that thing. This coming towards is the future dimension of her activity. Thrownness, meanwhile, is being situated. When a person acts, she almost always responds to or acts in the light of particular states of affairs. These states of affairs are that given which she does whatever she does. This departing, or coming, from particular states of affairs in acting is the past dimension of activity. Being-amid, finally, is having to do with entities: acting amid, towards and at ( bei ) them. It is the present dimension of activity, activity itself. In sum, a person, when acting, comes towards a way of being departing from certain states of affairs. This acting-coming towards-departing from is the temporal structure of activity.

1962:412, Heidegger's emphasis). 7 Our practices for coping with the available are significantly different from our practices for dealing with the occurrent. Thus, Heidegger understands this changeover from dealing with things as available to dealing with them as occurrent as discontinuous. This changeover is crucial for Heidegger's answer to deflationary realism.

28. See Heidegger, Being and Time , sec. 22.

25. Heidegger, Being and Time , sec. 34.

25. See Heidegger, Being and Time , sec. 18.

First, feminist political theory in conjunction with our first platform (identifying the universal need for care) offers provocations that can broaden the scope of urban care research beyond spaces of interpersonal care and care through welfare. In particular, alongside Tronto (2013), we note the potential to approach care in spaces of political thinking. Every political theory, Tronto (2013) argues, contains a theory of care, of how the necessary work of care and life maintenance take place. Such analysis broadens the scope of care research to systems of social and political thinking that predominate in cities and the practices that they inform. Urban care researchers might attend to the care ethics practiced through urban governance and planning or that might better support the work of care as Kershaw (2005) does, for instance, at a broader scale. Similarly, urban researchers might attend to the care ethics that shape and inform systems of social organisation, asking how modes of urban governance and organisation might be understood to care. This is a call for research that considers the broader governing practices and modes of organisation that inform care practice and that support the flourishing of all human and non-human life. Smith's (2005) ground-breaking study identifying the care ethics that shape existing housing markets is an early example of this work. Her provocation to researchers,

In Section 3 of the paper, we changed registers, highlighting the value of broadening our conception of care as a need of all beings, both human and non-human. We advocated for an analysis that considers care practiced across the city and at an urban scale alongside the micro-spaces of care and interpersonal caring. We concluded by arguing for the value of locating urban care beyond interpersonal sites of caring to governance, markets, materialities, and by conceptualising how care might inform utopian dreamings for the just and caring city. Urban researchers have expanded ideas of the sustainable city, the resilient city, the smart city, the creative city, the just city, and the sharing city. Why not the caring city? Is it possible that cities might be judged not on how economically competitive they are but on how they best facilitate care for people, planet, animals, and future generations? If a feminist ethic of care is about everything we do to "maintain, continue and repair our worlds as well as possible" (Fisher & Tronto, 1990), then how might urban geographers value, plan, advocate for, and support cities that better enable and facilitate the

The third research paper explores the performance of circular consumption in everyday lives of households. Theoretically, it draws on the theories of practice approach to consumption from the sociology of consumption (Warde, 2005), combined with the feminist scholarship on care (Fisher and Tronto, 1990; Tronto, 1993). In the paper, we (together with Christian Fuentes as second author) wanted to understand how care is involved in performing circular consumption. Previous studies argue that in circular consumption, consumers are asked to care for belongings as well as for distant and future others (Ackermann, 2018; Jaeger-Erben et al., 2021; Rabin and Jaeger-Erben, 2022). However, while care has been part of discussions in consumption studies in the

in consumption is a more recent endeavour (for example, Shaw et al, 2017; Godin, 2022; Koskinen and Jauho, 2024). Drawing mainly on Tronto's (1993) feminist ethics of care, scholars have begun to explore what care can offer the field of consumption (Shaw et al, 2017; Chatzidakis and Shaw, 2018).

The ethics of care refers to a feminist approach in which relations and practices of care and responsibility are considered a fundamental feature of all human social life (Robinson, 1999; Tronto, 1993). Since the 1980s, the ethics of care has highlighted the importance of the relationality and interdependency of actors, as well as vulnerability and embodiment, often contrasting them with rights-based approaches that root ethics in abstract rationality and autonomy (Gilligan, 1982; Tronto, 1993; see also Godin, 2022). According to a popular definition created by Fisher and Tronto (1990, p. 40), care "includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our 'world' so that we can live in it as well as possible". This definition expands the web of caring to include not only human relationships but also relationships between humans and the environment or the biosphere.

We also use the care awareness, responsibility, and care resource concepts from care theory (Fisher and Tronto, 1990) to understand how care becomes

The ethics of care refers to a feminist approach in which relations and practices of care and responsibility are considered a fundamental feature of all human social life (Robinson, 1999; Tronto, 1993). Since the 1980s, the ethics of care has highlighted the importance of the relationality and interdependency of actors, as well as vulnerability and embodiment, often contrasting them with rights-based approaches that root ethics in abstract rationality and autonomy (Gilligan, 1982; Tronto, 1993; see also Godin, 2022). According to a popular definition created by Fisher and Tronto (1990, p. 40), care "includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our 'world' so that we can live in it as well as possible". This definition expands the web of caring to include not only human relationships but also relationships between humans and the environment or the biosphere.

Without entering into a long discussion on the ethics of care in feminist theory (Gilligan, 1982), nor on the logic of care versus the logic of choice (Mol, 2008), I wish to stress how ethics is a material-discursive component of an agencement of a

Thinking care as inseparably a vital affective state, an ethical obligation and a practical labour has been from very early on at the heart of feminist social sciences and political theory; an endeavour that has become more visible with increased interest in the ‘ethics of care’. While it is fair to say that care has been and remains an essential feature of transformative feminist politics and alternative forms of organizing, ‘caring’ is also commonplace in everyday moralizations: for example, companies compete to show how much they care, buying recycled toilet paper shows that we care, and caring for the self is a pervasive order of biopolitical morality.

It is worth emphasizing that this premise is grounded in ontological rather than in moral grounds. For not only do relations involve care, care is itself relational. We can read this in Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher's much quoted generic definition of care as including ' everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair "our world" so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life sustaining web ' (Tronto, 1993: 103, my emphasis). This vision of caring, if somewhat too centred on self, speaks of care as those doings needed to create, hold together and sustain life's essential heterogeneity. In the same direction, most feminist arguments on the ethics of care entail that to value care we have to recognize the inevitable interdependency essential to the reliant and vulnerable beings that we are (Kittay and Feder, 2002; Engster, 2005).