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How can politics be articulated or at least imagined by ill, impoverished and abandoned communities? This article documents how care is invoked by activist groups and local citizens in their search for ethical recognition and environmental justice in Puchuncaví, Chile. The authors argue that in a context of prolonged and systematic harm, care emerges as a way to render their suffering understandable, knowable and actionable, and thus as a mode of intervention that instantiates politics in different spaces and at several scales. At the interfaces of feminist science studies, environmental sociology and political theory, this article examines how care acts as a grammar to enunciate problems and make connections deemed irrelevant by expert apparatuses. Specifically, the authors ethnographically track the capacity of care practices to create therapeutic spaces of affective endurance and healing, and to produce new forms of sensual and ecological knowledge about beings, things and relations. These different modes of caring and being cared for, it is suggested, underline the capacity of care for the politicization of harm and suffering: to re-arrange what is visibilized, valued and problematized in the face of intractable environmental crises - a crucial objective for collectives removed from every form of politics. Care, as it is articulated here, is not a coherent and predefined programme, but a fluid and adaptable ethico-political set of practices and potentialities always concerning specific individuals facing specific problems in specific circumstances. If care is to be mobilized to craft more responseable policy, researchers should think more thoroughly about these multiple configurations of care, and the disparate ways in which they can contribute (or not) to invoke new styles and formats, new sensitivities and possibilities for policy-making.

"Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence.
Disasters are complex environmental, social and cultural events and processes yet disaster management approaches tend to simplify responses and homogenise affected populations. Participatory research with more than 550 children across Europe, detailed in this book argues for a radical transformation in children's roles in disasters. It shows how more child-centred working in civil protection and emergency planning, that recognises children's capacities in building resilience, benefits at-risk communities as a whole. "

This introductory essay conceptually situates the dialogue between Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and Social Movement Studies that this special issue aims to foster. Rather than considering ANT as a theory in the classic sense, we define it as a theoretical sensibility open to permanently redrawing its own shape in response to the relational entanglements it studies. ANT and its sibling, assemblage theory, have allowed scholars to attend to the complex ecologies within which agents, both human and non-human, mobilise to effect change in overlapping social, ecological, economic and technological realms. In these studies, relations take precedence over substances, thereby forging a radically decentred, redistributed approach to mobilisation. As such, ANT offers a point of departure from dominant understandings of social movements that rely on modernist, dualist epistemologies; ANT studies have expanded the body politic through the incorporation of non-human actants, and redefined collective action as a form of association between heterogeneous entities. Ultimately, we argue that ANT is a useful tool in the task of constructing forms of attention and care that aspire to learn from and think with social movements, rather than explaining them away.

In this paper we reflect empirically on some collective attempts at intervening the ways in which care for and by disabled people is being devised and carried out in Spain in austerity times. We highlight the novelties and challenges of the way in which these projects seek to tackle the current crisis of care through different forms of self-fabrication of 'open' and 'low cost' technical aids. We analyse them as forms of 'critical making' expanding the repertoire of independent-living and disabled people's rights politics to the experimentation with technological production. Through the deployment of an empirical example of the prototyping process by the Barcelona-based activist design collective 'En torno a la silla' we show how open prototyping constitutes a major challenge for the radicalisation of the independent-living movement's precepts of control and choice, displaying the matter of care arrangements and making available its transformation.

Taking his most recent publications on ways to engage with the planet as a point of departure, this conversation with Bruno Latour considers some of the political and conceptual challenges associated with what he calls the New Climate Regime. Latour discusses the need for breaking with the modernist framework that set the stage for the environmental crisis in the first place, and which has also hindered the capacity of social movements to affect the situation. Latour argues that only a new body politic (inclusive of non-humans) and a new geosocial politics (attuned to Gaia) will open up the possibility for sustaining life on our severely damaged planet.

What might child-centred disaster risk management (DRM) planning look like? We argue that this would certainly involve a cultural shift within what is a highly adult-centric and often militaristic milieu, towards recognition of the value of young people's experience and expertise. To examine what this shift involves, we work with two versions of 'culture'. The first entails regarding children themselves as a cultural group, by virtue of being disenfranchised from DRM matters, which in turn gives children a particular perspective on risk and disaster. Second, and as we saw from Chapter 1, 'childhood' itself is often universalised, yet children embody all the cultural differences and diversity found in society as a whole. To help promote culturally sensitive disaster planning, particularly in a changing and increasingly diverse Europe, we have developed a resource to assist decision-makers and practitioners in disaster management work in a more child-friendly way. This Framework draws directly on what we have learned from the children and young people participating in the CUIDAR project (see Figure 4.1). It draws on what they told us they needed to become resilient; how 'adultist' plans should change, and how authorities and practitioners within DRM need to listen strategically to benefit from the contributions of children and young people. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion