Webs of Care

“How does one imagine care for a post-anthropocentric world? Care for your software like you would care about yourself? Love your infrastructure?” (Parikka, 2019)

In this module’s required reading, “A Care Worthy of Its Time,” Jussi Parikka urges scholars across the digital humanities to reimagine what care means in a digitally networked world (2019). Drawing on care-based approaches, some of which span decades (such as Joan Tronto’s writing quoted at the beginning of this module), Parikka points toward the many enactments of care that might be woven into future digital humanities practice. Although written for digital humanities contexts, Parikka’s piece is also resonant for scholars across the spatial- and geo-humanities. Thinking of care as a “web” of approaches and materialities also carries many spatialities, including digital, metaphorical, material, and cultural webs, to name but a few.

A key ethical challenge in the digital age is building webs of care that include, but do not “merely fold back on,” the human. In discussing the need to move away from human-centred approaches, for example, Parikka quotes Rosi Braidotti’s assertion that animals, machines and earth ‘others’ can be equal partners in an ethical exchange. (Braidotti, 2006: 121)

Parikka summarizes both the spatial and the political potential of expanding such exchanges:

Care detaches from being merely a relation among humans and becomes involved in a wider, more radical political ecology (and hence also involved in questions about what sorts of power relations are embedded in the situations of care that are unevenly distributed across the social field).

Besides de-centring the human in digital storytelling, a care-based approach can incorporate a range of other considerations across the digital and spatial humanities. Parikka summarizes a few trajectories in his piece, from Verena Andermatt Conley’s (2016) notion of “the care of the possible” (care as a philosophical practice attached to the future) to the extension or “scaling up” of care beyond isolated objects (care toward networks and other infrastructures).

All of these approaches are connected through space. They gesture toward the idea that a care-based approach can re-spatialize worlds, and thus the telling of those worlds. Beyond building spaces of care through the digital humanities, we can also think about what it might mean to care more for/about space, a preoccupation within the spatial humanities but one that is still not exercised to its potential. In caring for/about space, the “webs of care” across the digital humanities can better address spatial justice.

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We are grateful for your engagement and participation throughout this course. We respectfully acknowledge that you bring your own contributions to the digital and spatial humanities as storytellers, story listeners, and story mappers. As such, we include you in our gesture toward hopeful futures, and wish you all the best.