Situated, affective, material practices of maintenance and response-ability that sustain relations and capacities within pedagogical and research apparatuses.
Care in a postqualitative, posthumanist, and new materialist register refers to the ongoing, situated practices that sustain, repair, and recompose relations in ways that allow beings, systems, and ideas to endure and transform. Drawing on Haraway’s notion of “response-ability” and “staying with the trouble,” care is a practice of becoming-with more-than-human worlds through attentive, accountable relations that are never abstract or universal, but always specific to a time, place, assemblage, and history. Care is thus neither sentiment nor service; it is a relational labor that attends to entanglements and their consequences, asking who and what is being enabled or foreclosed through particular configurations.
In conversation with Barad’s agential realism, care is inseparable from the cuts made in inquiry and pedagogy: apparatuses enact boundaries that matter, and care is the practice of tuning those apparatuses toward just and life-sustaining effects. Braidotti’s posthuman ethics foregrounds care as an affirmative, situated ethics attentive to relational vitality and difference; Puig de la Bellacasa elaborates care as speculative and material, a practice of thinking-feeling with worlds that need tending; Ahmed treats care as an affective orientation that shapes what bodies can do in institutions; Bennett and Tsing deepen the material and ecological sensibilities of care by showing how vibrant matter and multispecies entanglements require practices that notice and cultivate delicate interdependencies. In this sense, care is a worldly competence: the capacity to respond to the patterned fragilities and potentials of a given assemblage and to hold open conditions for flourishing.
Care reorients method as an ethical-material practice rather than a procedural checklist. In postqualitative inquiry, designing an apparatus, composing a corpus, and writing analysis are acts that shape worlds; care names the ongoing attentiveness to those worlding effects. It involves cultivating response-ability to participants, technologies, data traces, and settings; making accountable agential cuts that do not erase difference; and sustaining conditions for participation, consent, and interpretation that are attuned to material consequences. Practically, care can look like slow, iterative consent; reflexive documentation of apparatus changes; attention to the affective demands of fieldwork; and reparative writing practices that acknowledge exclusions and debts. It aligns with new materialist commitments to the vitality and durability of materials, with posthumanist ethics of situated accountability, and with postqualitative refusals of extractive data practices in favor of relational maintenance and compositional rigor.
Care helps surface how AI-entangled classrooms hinge on ongoing maintenance and response-ability: calibrating prompts and policies so that student composing capacities grow rather than narrow; crafting feedback practices that support human-AI collaboration without outsourcing judgment or voice; and tending to the affective climate as instructors and students navigate uncertainty, excitement, and fatigue. It encourages apparatus designs—assignment prompts, revision protocols, reflection practices, interface configurations—that sustain relationships among students, instructors, and tools, distributing agency while preserving accountability. Care also names the ethical labor of attending to bias, provenance, and datafication: documenting model limitations, crediting sources, situating AI outputs in rhetorical contexts, and building practices that support students’ authorship as an emergent capacity rather than a possession. Instructors’ well-being and workload are part of the assemblage, so care involves designing sustainable routines, shared norms, and material supports that keep the pedagogical system livable while it evolves.