Systems of People / Care / Research on Care
Research on Care
A short orientation to where these ideas come from, for anyone who wants to go deeper than a session allows.
The categories and kinds of care on this site aren't invented for a workshop. They draw on decades of work across psychology, philosophy, and sociology. A few of the foundational threads:
Joan Tronto mapped care as a process with distinct phases: caring about a need, caring for it, doing the actual work, and how the other person receives it. Her work is the closest thing this field has to a shared map. Her book Moral Boundaries (1993) introduces the five phases, and Caring Democracy (2013) is where "caring with" specifically comes from.
Milton Mayeroff broke caring down into its working parts in On Caring (1971): knowing what someone actually needs, patience, honesty, trust, and a few others that don't get talked about enough. If you've heard me talk about care as a skill rather than a feeling, this is where that comes from.
Nel Noddings built an entire ethics around care as a starting point for how people should treat each other, not an add-on to other principles, in Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (1984).
John Bowlby's attachment research, particularly Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1: Attachment (1969), is where a lot of the "comfort" and "safety" language in the Expressive & Emotional category traces back to. It's the most widely known name on this list outside academic circles.
Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone (2000) connects directly to the trust and community work at the centre of everything I do here. Care at the individual level and trust at the community level are not separate conversations.
This is a starting point, not the full picture. The complete history, including where researchers still disagree and where the gaps are, gets the long-form treatment on Shifting Tides.