How are practices of care sometimes not fair? The case of parenting and private car use

ABSTRACT

How is it that the intention to care can produce and reproduce a practice that is quintessentially unjust? This conceptual piece uses the everyday transport practices of families to explore the paradox between individual practices of care and aspirations to just and care-full cities. In doing so, it encounters a fundamental barrier to the melding of care with notions of justice. While structurally and culturally, care and justice must fuse as aspirations, from the perspective of the individual in practice, care motivates actions that are anything but inclusive and equitable. Indeed, care in practice undermines aspirations to justice in a way that needs to be accounted for if utopian visions of more care-full and just cities can be realised. Tools and concepts from social practice theory are deployed to reveal how care melds with infrastructure and ‘ways of doing’ to entrench the mobile stratifications that both represent and perpetuate injustice.

KEYWORDS:

• Automobility
• care
• justice
• social practice theory
• family transport
• mobility‌

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council: [Grant Number DE190100211].

Notes on contributors

Jennifer L. Kent

Dr Jennifer L. Kent is a Senior Research Fellow in Urbanism at the University of Sydney School of ARchitecture Design and PLanning. Her research interests are at the intersections between transport, health and urban planning.