The Care Factory

Book excerpt: What is care? The Care Factory consists of six essays, each of which is an invitation to the reader to form an opinion on what care happens to be. Each chapter looks at care in a different setting, and a variety of psychoanalytic frameworks are employed on which to hang arguments. The eponymous first chapter investigates undergraduate courses in nursing and midwifery that have care on the syllabus. Is it possible to teach care? What if the person teaching care is not someone who cares? The second chapter is ‘Banquet of Crumbs’. If care can be experienced in any setting and at any time, is there anything that happens to those who care that we might regard as generic? What does caring do to the practitioners who care? The focus of ‘The Breaking of Wings’ is prisons and secure settings for children and adolescents. How do such institutions endorse and exhibit care? In ‘Nostalgia’s Engine’, the focus is on the care generated by successful group assimilation and the manufacture of nostalgia. Using the example of the punk movement of the 1970s, this chapter describes how organisations offer their participants communities of care, irrespective of their outward appearance of hostility. ‘Caring for Our Creations’ is about writing, and about one’s responsibilities for what one drafts into existence. This chapter is not so much about a narrative of care as the care of a narrative. Finally, ‘Take Care: A Coda’ represents a lesson on how one cares for oneself in an atmosphere of tension and bereavement anxiety.