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Care-Politics

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Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. This book brings feminist science and technology studies together with design research, arguing that design's focus on 'matters of concern...
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  • 22 December 2026
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Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

This book brings feminist science and technology studies together with design research, arguing that design's focus on 'matters of concern' can be shifted toward 'matters of care'. It introduces a typology of five care-politics, a framework for understanding how care is put into practice.

Using case studies that range from a workshop on gender in design to the ongoing responsibilities of research devices, the book explores the pitfalls of working ‘with care’ and proposes more inventive approaches to ethics.

This is a key resource for scholars and students grappling with the ethical and political dimensions of design and related fields.

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Price: $44.95
Pages: 192
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Imprint: Bristol University Press
Series: Dis-positions: Troubling Methods and Theory in STS
Publication Date: 22 December 2026
ISBN: 9781529251975
Format: Paperback
BISACs: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / Social Theory, Social theory, DESIGN / General, PHILOSOPHY / Ethics & Moral Philosophy, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Feminism & Feminist Theory, Gender studies, gender groups, History of design, Social and ethical issues, Ethics and moral philosophy, Feminism and feminist theory
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'Design is never neutral. Even in its most pressingly scientific figurations, it has politics. In Care-politics, Sara Pennington shows readers how this political propensity unfolds through an inventive ethics, the name she gives to a feminist approach that foregrounds matters of care. Pennington urges an encounter with and through care not as an essential ingredient to design, but as an expansive orientation to its practice, pedagogy, and performance, one that critically accounts for its ethical entanglements and lived consequences.' Daniela Rosner, University of Washington
Sarah Pennington is a Senior Lecturer in Design at Goldsmiths University and Co-Director of the Design Societies Research Unit.

1. Approaching Design and STS with care

2. A typology of care-politics

3. Made in the name of care: Unsettling gendered caring affects

4. Speculating with care: Between maintenance and the possible

5. Being careful with the idiot: The story of a lost research device

6. Inventive ethics and constraints of care