Love and the Politics of Care : Methods, Pedagogies, Institutions

This edited volume offers a contemporary rethinking of the relationship between love and care in the context of neoliberal practices of professionalization and work. Each of the book’s three sections interrogates a particular site of care, where the affective, political, legal, and economic dimensions of care intersect in challenging ways. These sites are located within a variety of institutionally managed contexts such as the contemporary university, the theatre hall, the prison complex, the family home, the urban landscape, and the care industry. The geographical spread of the case studies stretches across India, Vietnam, Sweden, Brazil, South Africa, the UK and the US and provides broad coverage that crosses the divide between the Global North and the Global South. To address this transnational interdisciplinary field of study, the collection utilises insights from across the humanities and social sciences and includes contributions from literature, sociology, cultural and media studies, philosophy, feminist theory, theatre, art history, and education. These inquiries build on a variety of conceptual tools and research methods, from data analysis to psychoanalytic reading. Love and the Politics of Care delivers an attentive and widely relevant examination of the politics of care and makes a compelling case for an urgent reconsideration of the methods that currently structure and regulate it. "Love and the Politics of Care articulates the concept of love as a new and significant field of interest in studies of the emotions across the arts, social sciences, and humanities. Addressing love within social structures and institutions, such as marriage, education, prison, and the family, among others, this volume explores where those institutional structures inhibit loving practices and what it would take to restore love to such spaces. Talking about love across the humanities and social sciences - including literary studies, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and gender studies - provides a further impetus for renewed investigation of a history of ideas that often encloses itself with the confines of Western philosophy. This interdisciplinary exploration of what love means in the 21st century across five continents incorporates academic writing and original creative work from established and emerging scholars around the globe. The volume looks at the past, present, and future in search of inspiration for transforming and re-charting the pathways of love, seeking a more diverse and emancipatory model of social life."-- Contents Figures Contributors Preface Acknowledgements Introduction Part 1 Public romance in India and its transgressive potential Gratitude’s compulsion Part 2 Symbiosis masquerades as love in the (post-) apartheid world of Marlene van Niekerk’s Parenting as a political pedagogy: Love as methodology, parenting as praxis voice and under-represented expressions of love in and through by She Goat: An artist-researcher’s perspective Part 3 Not in the mood: Reading love in the contemporary university Should I be scared when you say that you love me? Youth work practice and the power of Reciprocity, love and market in Brazilian care work for the elderly Love, power and justice in the shadow of the contemporary English prison Index "Interdisciplinary studies on the position of love in contemporary global thought and literature that address love and care work within social structures and institutions"-- Provided by publisher