Care as Collective Action

Bringing together care ethics and civil society scholarship, Care as Collective Action offers an original framework that understands collective action as a form of care and care itself as a form of civic engagement. It shows how citizens, civic associations, volunteer groups, social movements and third-sector organisations mobilise around shared concerns to sustain, repair and transform the worlds they inhabit. Drawing on research on migration, the climate crisis, urban transformations and emerging forms of precarity, the book examines how practices of care within and through civil society make public problems perceptible, cultivate shared responsibilities and create infrastructures of civic sensibilities in contexts marked by institutional neglect, political indifference and intersecting crises. In doing so, it reveals care not simply as a private response to precarity, but as a disruptive practice capable of reshaping the boundaries of responsibility and opening up new possibilities for living together.At a time of profound social and political uncertainty, this book offers a timely contribution to debates on care, democracy and collective action. More broadly, it argues that caring for one another, for shared worlds and for democracy itself is a condition for collective flourishing.Scholars and students interested in care ethics and civil society from a range of fields including sociology, migration studies, more-than-human studies, social movement studies, social welfare studies and volunteer studies will find this work appealing.