The uncomfortable politics of care and conflict: Exploring nontraditional caring agencies

Care ethics provides us with not only the framework for understanding people's relationality but attention to the very fact that relations matter in structuring society. However, not all caring relations result in care, despite their power in structuring society. This paper follows Raghuram's (2016) argument to “trouble care” in order to bring more attention to the diversity of caring practices, actors, and politics in our worlds to better explore contentious caring relations. Through analyzing a high profile campus sexual assault case, this paper extends research on care beyond traditional caregiving relationships and demonstrates how these nontraditional caring actors exhibit a diversity of caring practices in a variety of spaces. The concept of “caring agencies” is introduced to bring deliberate attention to the ways that diverse caring practices have political ramifications that stretch beyond the immediate situation of care and expose systematic power differentials among care-givers, care-receivers and those beyond these categories. The case study in this paper, People v. Turner, offers insights into the pervasive culture of sexism that enables and results in harmful and unjust caring agencies which perpetuates conflict in society. Further research is called for to expose provocative and uncomfortable case studies of care to expand our analyses of care and relations of power.