Care Crisis

Abstract

Care is increasingly narrativised as being “in crisis,” due to the systematic erosion of care infrastructures and the financialisation of all forms of care (e.g. social care, eldercare, childcare, disability care, healthcare). This chapter argues that “care crisis” is in fact a crisis in and of time. Care is made through practices that do not align with the time of production, progress or growth, but instead involve the uncertain temporalities of sustaining interdependence: waiting, staying, enduring, persisting and repeating. While crisis calls for decision and action, we argue that care requires being prepared to stick with another kind of time. Using the affective quality of “flatness” anatomised in Noreen Masud’s memoir A flat place (2023) and connecting it with the importance of a depressed mood, this chapter develops the notion of “depressing time” to describe the temporal conditions of collective waiting in and for care. This “depressing time” is neither a form of future grief nor melancholia linked to past traumas, but a way to choose to “know” about crisis and violence without moving into the temporality of anti-crisis (Roitman, 2016).