Care,policy,knowledge: Translating between worlds

Abstract

It is the achievement of this collection to challenge our everyday distinction between care and policy. In these ethnographic accounts, we learn how something we might call ‘care-policy’ is achieved in practice, ‘on the ground’. This brief postscript draws attention to the corollary world of the office, the way care-policy is constructed in the committee room and the debating chamber, in the offices and corridors of its administration. The author notes how the work of the office is likewise constituted in practice, in interaction between people and between people and things. It is suggested that care-policy in the field and in the office is predicated on different ways of knowing which reflect a specific tension between case and category. The studies presented here are made at the point of intersection of discrepant worlds/knowledges: some seem to expose and emphasise those discrepancies, but others point to ways in which, in practice, they might be resolved. In carrying out inspections, in assembling and articulating generic experiences of injustice, some actors seem to do care and policy together, piecing together knowledges of different kinds, translating between worlds.