This paper brings into proximity and advances geographical engagements with care to propose a new radical care framework for research with minoritised migrants and refugees in the city. Informed by calls for alternative and care-full modes of knowledge production through creative engagements with lived experiences of care and building on recent scholarship on shadow infrastructures of care in cities, it examines how we might attend to the invisibilised modes of caring in the city with migrants and refugees. The paper outlines three dimensions of the framework – knowledges, temporalities and spatialities – as starting points to develop more expansive understandings of care and its radical potential, offering new politics and poetics that challenge and refuse the co-optation of care into the logics of neoliberalism and racial capitalism and to imagine more care-full urban futures.
AswadNG (2024) Cultivating radical care and otherwise possibilities at the end of the world. Quarterly Journal of Speech110(2): 313–319.
6.
AtkinsonSLawsonVWilesJ (2011) Care of the body: spaces of practice. Social & Cultural Geography12(6): 563–572.
7.
BaldassarLKilkeyMMerlaL, et al. (2018) Transnational families in the era of global mobility. In: Handbook of Migration and Globalisation. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 387–401.
8.
BartosAE (2019) Introduction: stretching the boundaries of care. Gender, Place & Culture26(2): 767–777.
9.
BaruaM (2023) Lively Cities: Reconfiguring Urban Ecology. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
10.
BasselLEmejuluA (2018) Caring subjects: migrant women and the third sector in England and Scotland. Ethnic and Racial Studies41(1): 36–54.
11.
BélangeDSilveyR (2019) An im/mobility turn: power geometries of care and migration. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies46(16): 3423–3440.
12.
BenwellMCHopkinsPFinlayR (2023) The slow violence of austerity politics and the UK’s ‘hostile environment’: examining the responses of third sector organisations supporting people seeking asylum. Geoforum145: 103845.
13.
BhatiaMCanningV (2021) Stealing Time: Migration, Temporalities and State Violence. Berlin, Germany: Springer.
14.
BlockK (2024) Epistemic caring: an ethical approach for the co-constitution of knowledge in participatory research practice. Social Epistemology1–19. DOI: 10.1080/02691728.2024.240763.
15.
BluntAEbbensgaardCLSheringhamO (2021) The ‘living of time’: entangled temporalities of home and the city. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers46(1): 149–162.
16.
BoanoCAstolfoG (2020) Notes around hospitality as inhabitation: engaging with the politics of care and refugees’ dwelling practices in the Italian urban context. Migration and Society: Advances in Research3: 222–232.
17.
BowlbyS (2012) Recognising the time—space dimensions of care: caringscapes and carescapes. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space44(9): 2101–2118.
18.
BowlbySJuppE (2021) Home, inequalities and care: perspectives from within a pandemic. International Journal of Housing Policy21(3): 423–432.
19.
BradleyGMde NoronhaL (2022) Against Borders: The Case for Abolition. Brooklyn, NY: Verso Books.
CamptT (2017) Listening to Images. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
22.
CamptTM (2019) Black visuality and the practice of refusal. Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory29(1): 79–87.
23.
ChatzidakisAHakimJLittlerJ, et al. (2020a) From carewashing to radical care: the discursive explosions of care during Covid-19. Feminist Media Studies20(6): 889–895.
24.
ChatzidakisAHakimJLittlerJ, et al. (2020b) The Care Manifesto: Politics of Interdependence. London, UK: Verso.
25.
Clark-KazakC (2023) “Why care now” in forced migration research? Imagining a radical feminist ethics of care. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies22(4): 1151–1173.
26.
ConradsonD (2003) Spaces of care in the city: the place of a community drop-in centre. Social & Cultural Geography4: 507–525.
27.
CoxR (2013) Gendered spaces of commoditised care. Social & Cultural Geography14(5): 491–499.
28.
CrafterSRosenRMeetooV (2021) Precarious care and (Dis)Connections. In: International Perspectives in Psychology. Göttingen, Germany: Hogrefe Publishing. Available at: https://econtent.hogrefe.com/doi/10.1027/2157-3891/a000009 (accessed 8 January 2024).
29.
DarlingJ (2011) Giving space: care, generosity and belonging in a UK asylum drop-in centre. Geoforum42(4): 408–417.
30.
DarlingJ (2022) Systems of Suffering: Dispersal and the Denial of Asylum. London, UK: Pluto Press.
31.
DattaKMcIlwaineCEvansY, et al. (2010) A migrant ethic of care? Negotiating care and caring among migrant workers in London’s low-pay economy. Feminist Review94(1): 93–116.
32.
de la BellacasaMP (2017) Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
33.
de LeeuwSHawkinsH (2017) Critical geographies and geography’s creative re/turn: poetics and practices for new disciplinary spaces. Gender, Place & Culture24(3): 303–324.
34.
DonáG (2021) Race, immigration and health: the hostile environment and public health responses to COVID-19. Ethnic and Racial Studies44(5): 906–918.
35.
DowlerLCuomoDRanjibarAM, et al. (2019) Care. Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode at 50. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 35–40.
36.
DowlingE (2022) The Care Crisis: What Caused it and How Can We End it?London, UK: Verso Books.
37.
DrotbohmHDilgerH (2024) Affective regimes of care beyond humanitarian crisis. Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology98: 1–14.
EvansRThomasF (2009) Emotional interactions and an ethics of care: caring relations in families affected by HIV and AIDS. Emotions, Space and Society2(2): 111–119.
41.
Fiddian-QasmiyehE (ed) (2020) Refuge in a Moving World: Tracing Refugee and Migrant Journeys across Disciplines. London, UK: UCL Press.
42.
FinlayRHopkinsPBenwellM (2021) “It’s like Rubbing Salt on the Wound”: The Impacts of COVID-19 and Lockdown on Asylum Seekers and Refugees. Newcastle, UK: UKRI/ESRC Newcastle University Report.
43.
FraserN (2016) Contradictions of capital and care. New Left Review100: 99–117.
44.
FrazerR (2020) Becoming-friend and the limits of care in refugee resettlement. Emotion, Space and Society37: 100733.
45.
FrazerR (2022) Care, chaos and cosmos: territorial refrains of refugee belonging. Social & Cultural Geography23(7): 915–933.
46.
GabauerAKnierbeinSCohenN, et al. (2021) Care, uncare, and the city. In: Gabauer (ed) Care and the City. London, UK: Routledge.
47.
GilliganC (1982) In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
48.
GilmoreR (2007) Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press.
49.
GilmoreR (2023) Abolition Geography: Essays towards Liberation. Brooklyn, NY: Verso Books.
50.
GirvanAPardesiBBhandarD, et al. (2020) Poetics of care: remedies for racial capitalism gone viral. Feminist Studies46(3): 717–728.
51.
GrazianoVMarsMMedakT (2025) Pirate Care: Acts against the Criminalization of Solidarity. London, UK: Pluto Press.
52.
GreenhoughBDaviesGBowlbyS (2023) Why “cultures of care”. Social & Cultural Geography24(1): 1–10.
53.
GriffithsMBE (2014) Out of time: the temporal uncertainties of refused asylum seekers and immigration detainees. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies40: 1991–2009.
54.
HanrahanKBSmithCE (2020) Interstices of care: re-imagining the geographies of care. Area52(2): 230–234.
55.
HarawayD (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
56.
HarmanK (2021) Sensory ways of knowing care – possibilities for reconfiguring ‘the distribution of the sensible’ in paid homecare work. International Journal of Care and Caring5(3): 433–446.
57.
HarrisCP (2023) To Build a Black Future: The Radical Politics of Joy Pain and Care. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
58.
HeldV (1993) Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
59.
HirschLA (2019) In the wake: interpreting care and global health through black geographies. Area52: 314–321.
60.
HobartHJKKneeseT (2020) Radical care: survival strategies for uncertain times. Social Text38(1): 1–16.
61.
HolzbergB (2024) Affective Bordering: Race, Deservingness and the Emotional Politics of Migration Control. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.
62.
hooksB (1990) Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston, MA: South End Press.
63.
HunterS (2021) Decolonizing white care: relational reckoning with the violence of coloniality in welfare. Ethics and Social Welfare15(4): 344–362.
64.
IsokeZ (2013) Urban Black Women and the Politics of Resistance. Berlin, Germany: Springer.
65.
JohnsenSClokePMayJ (2005) Day centres for homeless people: spaces of care or fear?Social & Cultural Geography6(6): 787–811.
66.
JordanZ (2024) “If I fall down, he will pick me up”: refugee hosts and everyday care in protracted displacement. Frontiers in Human Dynamics6: 1282535.
67.
KäkeläEBaillotHKerlaffL, et al. (2023) From acts of care to practice-based resistance: refugee-sector service provision and its impact(s) on integration. Social Sciences12: 39.
68.
KallioKPMeierIHäkliJ (2021) Radical hope in asylum seeking: political agency beyond linear temporality. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies47(17): 4006–4022.
69.
KimmererRW (2013) Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions.
70.
LancioneM (2023) For a Liberatory Politics of Home. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
71.
LancioneM (2024) Radical housing justice within and beyond caring. Antipode56(3): 841–846.
72.
LawsonV (2007) Geographies of care and responsibility. Annals of the Association of American Geographers97(1): 1–11.
LordeA (1977) Poetry is Not a Luxury Your Silence Will Not Protect You. London, UK: Silver Press, 8–9. (2017; repr., Chrysalis: A Magazine of Female Culture, 1977).
75.
LordeA (1988) A Burst of Light, Essays. London, UK: Sheba Feminist Publishers.
76.
MadanipourA (2022) Critical reflections on care. In: GabauerA (ed) Care and the City: Encounters with Urban Studies. New York, NY: Routledge, 15–23.
77.
MartinAMyersNViseuA (2015) The politics of care in technoscience. Social Studies of Science45(5): 625–641.
78.
MasseyD (2004) Geographies of responsibility. Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography86(1): 5–18.
MayblinLWakeMKazemiM (2020) Necropolitics and the slow violence of the everyday: asylum seeker welfare in the postcolonial present. Sociology54(1): 107–123.
81.
MayoS (2021) “We know…”: collective care in participatory arts. Performance Paradigm16: 184–197.
82.
McAvincheyC (2020) Clean break: a practical politics of care. In: FisherASThompsonJ (eds) Performing Care. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 123–138.
83.
McEwanCGoodmanMK (2010) Place geography and the ethics of care: introductory remarks on the geographies of ethics, responsibility and care. Ethics, Place & Environment13(2): 103–112.
84.
McIlwaineCRyburnM (2024) Introduction: towards migration-violence creative pathways. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies50(13): 3229–3251.
85.
McKieLGregorySBowlbyS (2002) Shadow times: the temporal and spatial frameworks and experiences of caring and working. Sociology36: 897–924.
86.
McKittrickK (2020) Dear Science and Other Stories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
87.
McKittrickK (2022) Dear april: the aesthetics of black miscellanea. Antipode54(1): 3–18.
88.
MedelC (2017) Abolitionist care in the militarized borderlands. South Atlantic Quarterly116(4): 873–883.
89.
MilanCMartiniC (2024) Bringing care in: the meaning of care in refugee solidarity movements. Journal of Refugee Studies37(3): 615–630.
90.
MilliganC (2001) Geographies of Care: Space, Place and the Voluntary Sector. 1st edition. London, UK: Routledge.
91.
MilsteinCB (ed) (2024) Constellations of Care: Anarcha-Feminism in Practice. London, UK: Pluto Books.
92.
MiraftabFHuqE (2024) Urbanizing social reproduction: (re)thinking the politics of care in capitalist urban development. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space42(2): 234–253.
93.
MuñozSClarkJAuerbachJ, et al. (2023) Under lockdown: remaking “home” through infrastructures of care during COVID-19. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space41(8): 1555–1574.
94.
MunroE (2013) “People just need to feel important, like someone is listening”: recognising museums’ community engagement programmes as spaces of care. Geoforum48: 54–62.
95.
MurphyM (2015) Unsettling care: troubling transnational itineraries of care in feminist health practices. Social Studies of Science45(5): 717–737.
96.
NagarR (2019) Hungry Translations: Relearning the World through Radical Vulnerability. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.
97.
NarayanU (1995) Colonialism and its others: considerations on rights and care discourses. Hypatia10(2): 133–140.
98.
NgurraDDaddLGlassP, et al. (2019) Yanama budyari gumada: reframing the urban to care as Darug Country in western Sydney. Australian Geographer50: 279–293.
99.
NoddingsN (1984) Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley, CA: University of CA Press.
100.
NoxoloPRaghuramPMadgeC (2012) Unsettling responsibility: postcolonial interventions. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers37(3): 418–429.
101.
OliverC (2023) Transforming paradise: neoliberal regeneration and more-than-human urbanism in Birmingham. Urban Studies60(3): 519–536.
102.
OlufemiL (2021) Experiments in Imagining Otherwise. London, UK: Hajar Press.
OrlekJMcAndrewCCerulliC, et al. (2023) For a relational understanding of care in critical urban action. Lo Squaderno45: 43–48.
105.
O’BrienME (2023) Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care. London, UK: Pluto Books.
106.
O’NeillMErelUKaptaniE, et al. (2019) Borders, risk and belonging: challenges for arts-based research in understanding the lives of women asylum seekers and migrants ‘at the borders of humanity’. Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture10(1): 129–147.
107.
PayntorE (2022) Testimony on the move: navigating the borders of (in)visibility with migrant-led soundwalks. a|b: Auto|Biography Studies37(1): 129–152.
108.
Piepzna-SamarasinhaLL (2018) Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press.
109.
PopkeJ (2006) Geography and ethics: everyday mediations through care and consumption. Progress in Human Geography30(4): 504–512.
110.
PowerER (2019) Assembling the capacity to care: caring-with precarious housing. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers44(4): 763–777.
111.
PowerERWilliamsMJ (2019) Cities of care: a platform for urban geographical care research. Geography Compass14(1): e12474.
112.
PowerERWieselIMitchellE, et al. (2022) Shadow care infrastructures: sustaining life in post-welfare cities. Progress in Human Geography46(5): 1165–1184.
113.
PuarJK (2017) The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
114.
QasmiyehYFiddian-QasmiyehE (2016) Refugee camps and cities in conversation. In: GarnettJHarrisA (eds) Rescripting Religion in the City: Migration and Religious Identity in the Modern Metropolis. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 131–143.
115.
QuizarJ (2024) A logic of care and black grassroots claims to home in detroit. Antipode56(3): 801–820.
116.
RaghuramP (2016) Locating care ethics beyond the global North. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies15(3): 511–533.
117.
RaghuramP (2019) Race and feminist care ethics: intersectionality as method. Gender, Place & Culture26(5): 613–637.
118.
RaghuramP (2021) Caring for the manifesto —steps toward making it an achievable dream. Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society28(4): 865–873.
119.
RaghuramPMadgeCNoxoloP (2009) Rethinking responsibility and care for a postcolonial world. Geoforum40(1): 5–13.
120.
RaiS (2024) Depletion: The Human Costs of Caring. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
121.
RoseN (2024) Solidarity apothecary: reclaiming life. In: MilsteinC (ed) Constellations of Care: Anarcha-Feminism in Practice. London, UK: Pluto Books, 175–195.
122.
SaitoY (2022) Aesthetics of Care: Practice in Everyday Life. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic.
123.
SegalL (2023) Lean on Me: A Politics of Radical Care. London, UK: Verso Books.
124.
SeilerC (2020) The origins of white care. Social Text38(1): 17–38.
125.
SeppäläTSarantouMMiettinenS (2021) Arts-Based Methods for Decolonising Participatory Research. New York, NY: Routledge.
126.
ShahrokhT (2022) Finding ‘belonging’ in the caring relationships of young people with migration experiences in South Africa. Journal of the British Academy10(s2): 15–36.
127.
SheringhamOTaylorH (2022) On stories, storytelling, and the quiet politics of welcome. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies21(3): 284–302.
128.
SheringhamOTaylorHDuffy-SyediK (2024) Care-full resistance to slow violence: building radical hope through creative encounters with refugees during the pandemic. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies50(13): 3359–3378.
129.
SimoneA (2020) The complicity and interdependency of temporalities. Urban Geography41(10): 1274–1276.
130.
SimoneA (2022) The Surrounds: Urban Life within and beyond Capture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
131.
SimpsonLB (2017) As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
132.
Stuart-FisherAThompsonJ (2020) Performing Care: New Perspectives on Socially Engaged Theatre. Manchester, UK: University of Manchester Press.
133.
SuterBEvansRMas GiraltR, et al. (2025) Young people’s caring practices in transnational families in Sweden and the UK: care ethics and wellbeing. Population, Space and Place31(2): 70002.
134.
ThompsonJ (2015) Towards an aesthetics of care. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance20(4): 430–441.
135.
ThompsonJ (2022) Care Aesthetics: For Artful Care and Careful Art. London, UK: Routledge.
136.
ThompsonS (2024) Caring housing futures: a radical care framework for understanding rent control politics in Seattle, USA. Antipode56(3): 779–800.
137.
TicktinM (2011) Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
138.
TicktinM (2024) Care as Political Revolution? In: DrotbohmHDilgerH (eds). Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology, special issue on “Care Beyond Crisis. 98th ed. 64–70.
139.
TillKE (2012) Wounded cities: memory-work and a place-based ethics of care. Political Geography31(1): 3–14.
140.
TraillHAndersonSShawD, et al. (2024) Caring at the edges: infrastructures of care and repair in urban deprivation. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space42(2): 190–210.
141.
TrontoJC (1993) Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York, NY: Routledge.
142.
TrontoJC (1998) An ethic of care. Generations: Journal of the American Society on Aging. (Themed Issue: Ethics and Aging: Bringing the Issues Home)22(3): 15–20.
143.
TrontoJC (2013) Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice. New York, NY: NYU Press.
144.
TrueloveYRuszczykHA (2022) Bodies as urban infrastructure: gender, intimate infrastructures and slow infrastructural violence. Political Geography92: 102492.
145.
TsingAL (2004) Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
146.
TuckE (2009) Suspending damage: a letter to communities. Harvard Educational Review79(3): 409–428.
147.
VergèsF (2019) A Decolonial Feminism. London, UK: Pluto Press.
148.
WalkerS (2023) Challenging the antipolitics of regimes of care: young African men in Italy resist precarious futures. Signs49(1): 89–114.
149.
WilesJ (2024) Health geographies III: landscapes of care. Progress in Human Geography48(3): 371–380.
150.
WilliamsMJ (2017) Care-full justice in the city. Antipode49(3): 821–839.
151.
WilliamsMJ (2020) The possibility of care-full cities. Cities98: 102591.
152.
WoodLSwansonKColleyIIIDE (2020) Tenets for a radical care ethics in geography. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies19(2): 424–447.
153.
WoodlyDBrownRHMarinM, et al. (2021) The politics of care. Contemporary Political Theory20: 890–925.
