It is a global directory of people who believe care should be central to how we build, teach, design, research, organise, and lead. Whatever your field, if care shapes your practice, this is a place to find others and add resources. No emails are made public but everyone in the index will be able to see everyone else in the index. All the resources added will be fully public so add your books and work.
Same! It’s been awhile since a I found a new exciting care Substacker. Thought I knew them all! I am fixated on digging into the cultural roots of the care crisis, and while I took an interdisciplinary approach to that in my book I have since become particularly interested in care ethics and the encounter between two people as a ripe and rich place. I feel like dependency care was systemically left out of all our major meaning-making systems and was rendered a footnote to human existence. So glad to find others working to give it the major plot point status it deserves.
Thank you. This is courageous and this makes a good deal of sense. We need new ways to deal with education from both the inside and outside as relational. It may be a bit of a different education than you write about but do you know Care in Education by Sandra Wilde?
ABSTRACT
This philosophical commentary explores the meaning and significance of care in education, demonstrating how teaching with care enriches the art and soul of pedagogy. Wilde draws upon Western and Eastern philosophies that envision an integrated image of care to illuminate the value of cultivating understanding in the form of awareness, and compassion leading to right action. Comments and stories from teachers’ experiences demonstrate important aspects of care that are easily overlooked, such as present attention, listening and teacher, well-being. Although it uncovers a tragic conflict between caring and aspects of contemporary schooling, this book offers hope for teachers. It shares a vision of practice that has the potential to re-enliven and strengthen care even in the midst of these difficulties. It also offers a contemplative approach to pedagogy that calls educators into intentional action, showing them how to renew their deep ethical connections to students, to subject matter and to the world
Andrea, this essay does something rare: it demonstrates the very thing it argues for. Care as constitutive tension, not instrumental strategy — that distinction matters enormously, and you've found a way to make it felt rather than merely stated.
The navigation framing resonates deeply with work I've been doing on what I call compass versus map navigation. Your point that care is what makes movement into a path, rather than a value we apply to movement after the fact, strikes me as precisely right. The compass doesn't represent where you want to go; it registers actual forces and keeps the body in the loop. That's care as you're describing it: not a feeling added to action, but the primordial orienting structure without which there is no action worth the name.
What I find most generative here is your reframing of competition. The question isn't whether academia has too much tension — living systems are constituted by tension — but what the tension is caring for. That shift from competing stars to caring constellations isn't naive optimism; it's a precise structural observation about what produces durable knowledge and what merely produces metrics.
The personal testimony at the centre of this carries more weight than any argument could. That's the shape of the thing itself.
Thank you so much Terry! I’ve missed your wisdom. I like this idea of considering the compass as a different way of aligning than a map. Cool idea. Feel free to post a link here to wherever you may be writing about that
It’s surprising to happen across a site that focuses on “care,” a matter that has long interested me. My interest differs from yours, but overlaps too.
My interest is theorizing about long-range societal evolution (past, present, future). How and why societies began ages ago with one major realm (the tribe), then over time evolved today’s three major realms (civil society + government + market economy). How and why the three-realm design is now failing. Thus, whether it’s time to evolve a next/new/fourth realm, probably a pro-commons realm? And if so, what will it consist of? What actors, activities? For what purposes?
My top deduction so far is that this next-new realm will consist of a bundle(constellation?) of matters the three-realm design no longer handles well: namely, health, education, welfare, and the environment (HEWE for short). All will eventually migrate into forming this fourth realm. The guiding purpose will be “care” writ large: care of body, mind, and soul; people care, societal care, etc. — an organizing principle HEWE actors already innately share.
If so, it’s still a long ways off. One challenge will be to generate concepts and narratives about “care” that resonate across each HEWE sector, break their current siloing, and provide bases for integrating them apart from the existing three realms.
Maximizing identity, power, and profit — ingrained aims of the existing three realms — is what drives most policymakers and other leaders nowadays. Getting them to also favor maximizing care is what I long to see. Points you make about “systems of care,” “ecologies of interdependence,” interconnectedness, maintenance, fragility, resonance, and networks speak to that.
Hi David! Great to meet you. This really resonates with me and all this thinking of care I'm doing, also with the tradition from which it comes, though as you say, from different directions. I like the HEWE and would like to find out more. Do you know the work of the Bloomington school or Ostrom? Any thoughts on that? In my study of the hippocampus I try and understand the difference between movement as optimization and movement as attunement and I have lately been wondering about this as it might relate with issues of economics and politics.
Another care-oriented theorist who may be pertinent to your efforts is this “architect of planetary governance” where he says that “tentativeness, tenderness, and care are not like care of something, it's a way of being in the world.”
Also, this recent post by a psychologist who calls for "a world organized around care" tracks well with our calls for more care-centric frameworks, policies, and strategies:
Yes to your “create a “care index” of people working on this and join forces somehow.” I’ve hoped and waited for that. I’m in no position to host, etc. But eager to participate, contribute, etc. Should we continue discussing here or switch to email?
Good. I just filled out and submitted as a test. But where did it go next? To you for vetting? And where will we access the list of entries? Um, I forgot to save a copy for myself.
Good to hear. Thanks. Yes to being familiar with Ostrom’s work.
I’ve thinking and writing about prospects for a fourth realm of society since mid-1990s, and about care-centric HEWE matters forming its core since early 2000s. Here’s how I wrote it up at times:
"As for HEWE matters, I keep looking for indications that actors in the fields of health, education, welfare, and the environment are beginning to talk together, make common cause, find mutual concepts, and develop a language around care that spans all their fields horizontally — much as civil-society, government, and business actors have done for their own realms of activity. And I’ve wondered what would happen if someone (not me) took the initiative to put some doctors, teachers, welfarians, and environmentalists in a room together and asked them to talk about their mutual concerns. Would they indeed find common cause around common good? Find ways to move ahead and be done with the debilitating talk of profits, losses, and investment returns that private insurance companies and venture capital firms currently prioritize? That’s what I’m looking for — a liberation and de-colonization of the terms of discussion around HEWE matters that leads to a “new sectorism” — and it seems the looking will go on for a while." (October 2025)
“Here’s my point: While all four matters — health, education, welfare, and the environment — are viewed and treated separately by analysts, policymakers, and other actors, there’s a key commonality that’s being overlooked. All four are about maximizing care: people care, life care, planetary care; the care of body, mind, and soul, individually and collectively. Plus, each activity affects the others; their dynamics and vectors interact. Better health can lead to better education, and vice-vera, especially if welfare and environmental conditions are improved as well.
“Furthermore, the set of policy principles and positions that may be raised for any one of the four is pretty much the same for all of them. For example, debates exist for all four as to whether it/they should be recognized as a legal right, whether to approach matters individually or collectively, how to protect against risks and vulnerabilities, etc.
“What I deduce from this is that health, education, welfare, and the environment have so many affinities and are so intertwined as policy problems that it will make increasing sense for policymakers and other actors to view them as a bundled set — and eventually as bedrock components for constructing a new care-centric realm (sector) of society.
“Today, even if that analysis may sound potentially sensible to some people, it will still seem like fanciful unwelcome academic speculation in many circles. As I’ve been told, government agencies and capitalist enterprises presently have “hammer-lock” grips on healthcare and education. There is no way they will let go in today’s political and economic environments, much less allow health, education, welfare, and environmental matters to be bundled. But I see a path opening up in the years ahead." (March 2025)
"Here’s my speculative deduction: If we view health, education, welfare, and the environment together, as a set, we can see that they are mainly about maximizing care, broadly defined: people care, life care, planet care, in a sense the care of body, mind, and soul. Viewed as such — as an enormously complex interrelated set of matters that our existing sectors are no longer suited to handling — they look like the most potent candidates for a prospective “fourth sector” — probably a “commons sector” — for our society, as well as for other advanced societies on the verge of evolving from triform into quadriform systems." (December 2020)
I hope that helps, clarifies. Apology for being long-winded [and for subsequent edits to reduce clutter]. But “attunement” to “care” as you argue is what I seek too.
I really appreciate this David and it’s heartening to hear that you have been thinking through this and working on this. It is so important and there are many resonances. Is there anywhere you read more of your work?
Accounts from the earliest days of the Royal Society demonstrate enthusiasm for understanding, supporting each others explorations and discoveries, not simply in Britain but in correspondence across Europe. It was the collaboration that produced the stars.
The same has more recently been true of many literary and artistic movements, from impressionism to abstract expressionism to the music scenes of London, San Francisco, New York, Seattle.... When I took a class on The Literary History of the Beat Generation from Ginsberg, most all Allen talked about was how much they all cared for each other, far more than any details and specifics of the literature.
That is really interesting. Thinking through this historically in such a way seems like something someone could write a book about in fact. Did you ever frequent St Marks church or bookshop in the EV by chance?
Which location? I worked there in the last one in the nyu building and used to housesit for Larry and Anne (across from where Ginsberg lived, though he was long gone by then alas)
The 3rd Ave iteration. First half of the 90s I lived in Italian Williamsburg; the EV was first stop on the L in Manhattan. I sometimes wondered if an ancestor having farmed there in the 1600s had something to do with my comfort in that neighborhood.
So happy the algorithm gods led me to your work. The things you’ve written and spoken and made are giving me an explanatory framework for my many disparate projects as an artist, which is HUGH. All of it makes sense through the lens of care, which is so easy to overlook because we’re not taught to look for it. Thank you for all of your time and care.
Here is the Care Index that just came about from the comments to this post:
https://makingways.carrd.co/
It is a global directory of people who believe care should be central to how we build, teach, design, research, organise, and lead. Whatever your field, if care shapes your practice, this is a place to find others and add resources. No emails are made public but everyone in the index will be able to see everyone else in the index. All the resources added will be fully public so add your books and work.
Add yourself to be found and to find others: https://airtable.com/appDikgEx8TK49H3c/pagWLEIhg4eYCGMyv/form
thanks for creating this and articulating an expansion vision of care. my favorite thing!
Thank you Elissa! Glad this has brought us into one another’s orbits. Would love to hear more about what you do
Same! It’s been awhile since a I found a new exciting care Substacker. Thought I knew them all! I am fixated on digging into the cultural roots of the care crisis, and while I took an interdisciplinary approach to that in my book I have since become particularly interested in care ethics and the encounter between two people as a ripe and rich place. I feel like dependency care was systemically left out of all our major meaning-making systems and was rendered a footnote to human existence. So glad to find others working to give it the major plot point status it deserves.
Would like to read your book!
ah, thanks!
Hallelujah Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Jeff Buckley or Leonard Cohen?
It’s not either or andrea 😄
😂 🙌🏼
KD Lang
That’s it!
Thank you. This is courageous and this makes a good deal of sense. We need new ways to deal with education from both the inside and outside as relational. It may be a bit of a different education than you write about but do you know Care in Education by Sandra Wilde?
ABSTRACT
This philosophical commentary explores the meaning and significance of care in education, demonstrating how teaching with care enriches the art and soul of pedagogy. Wilde draws upon Western and Eastern philosophies that envision an integrated image of care to illuminate the value of cultivating understanding in the form of awareness, and compassion leading to right action. Comments and stories from teachers’ experiences demonstrate important aspects of care that are easily overlooked, such as present attention, listening and teacher, well-being. Although it uncovers a tragic conflict between caring and aspects of contemporary schooling, this book offers hope for teachers. It shares a vision of practice that has the potential to re-enliven and strengthen care even in the midst of these difficulties. It also offers a contemplative approach to pedagogy that calls educators into intentional action, showing them how to renew their deep ethical connections to students, to subject matter and to the world
Andrea, this essay does something rare: it demonstrates the very thing it argues for. Care as constitutive tension, not instrumental strategy — that distinction matters enormously, and you've found a way to make it felt rather than merely stated.
The navigation framing resonates deeply with work I've been doing on what I call compass versus map navigation. Your point that care is what makes movement into a path, rather than a value we apply to movement after the fact, strikes me as precisely right. The compass doesn't represent where you want to go; it registers actual forces and keeps the body in the loop. That's care as you're describing it: not a feeling added to action, but the primordial orienting structure without which there is no action worth the name.
What I find most generative here is your reframing of competition. The question isn't whether academia has too much tension — living systems are constituted by tension — but what the tension is caring for. That shift from competing stars to caring constellations isn't naive optimism; it's a precise structural observation about what produces durable knowledge and what merely produces metrics.
The personal testimony at the centre of this carries more weight than any argument could. That's the shape of the thing itself.
Thank you so much Terry! I’ve missed your wisdom. I like this idea of considering the compass as a different way of aligning than a map. Cool idea. Feel free to post a link here to wherever you may be writing about that
Thanks Andrea.
This piece initiated s series of four linked essays, of which the fourth will land at 8 o’clock tomorrow morning:
https://terrycookedavies.substack.com/p/the-man-who-hated-dreams?r=2ho4b2&utm_medium=ios
🙌🏼
Searching to learn more about etymology and history of “care” concept, I found this amazing History of Care Project at:
https://care.georgetown.edu/The%20Project.html
Especially illuminating is this wide-ranging Classic Article: "History of the Notion of Care" at:
https://care.georgetown.edu/Classic%20Article.html
Great article about the history of care!
Great. I added it to the Care Index resource list. You can add them too here: https://makingways.carrd.co/
It’s surprising to happen across a site that focuses on “care,” a matter that has long interested me. My interest differs from yours, but overlaps too.
My interest is theorizing about long-range societal evolution (past, present, future). How and why societies began ages ago with one major realm (the tribe), then over time evolved today’s three major realms (civil society + government + market economy). How and why the three-realm design is now failing. Thus, whether it’s time to evolve a next/new/fourth realm, probably a pro-commons realm? And if so, what will it consist of? What actors, activities? For what purposes?
My top deduction so far is that this next-new realm will consist of a bundle(constellation?) of matters the three-realm design no longer handles well: namely, health, education, welfare, and the environment (HEWE for short). All will eventually migrate into forming this fourth realm. The guiding purpose will be “care” writ large: care of body, mind, and soul; people care, societal care, etc. — an organizing principle HEWE actors already innately share.
If so, it’s still a long ways off. One challenge will be to generate concepts and narratives about “care” that resonate across each HEWE sector, break their current siloing, and provide bases for integrating them apart from the existing three realms.
Maximizing identity, power, and profit — ingrained aims of the existing three realms — is what drives most policymakers and other leaders nowadays. Getting them to also favor maximizing care is what I long to see. Points you make about “systems of care,” “ecologies of interdependence,” interconnectedness, maintenance, fragility, resonance, and networks speak to that.
So, I’ll be trying to tune in. Onward.
Hi David! Great to meet you. This really resonates with me and all this thinking of care I'm doing, also with the tradition from which it comes, though as you say, from different directions. I like the HEWE and would like to find out more. Do you know the work of the Bloomington school or Ostrom? Any thoughts on that? In my study of the hippocampus I try and understand the difference between movement as optimization and movement as attunement and I have lately been wondering about this as it might relate with issues of economics and politics.
Another care-oriented theorist who may be pertinent to your efforts is this “architect of planetary governance” where he says that “tentativeness, tenderness, and care are not like care of something, it's a way of being in the world.”
https://longnow.org/talks/02026-johar/
I know Indy and DML and love and appreciate all they contribute
I’ve more sources and references to add as we go along. Not sure where I filed them. From pro-noosphere circles, pro-commons circles, etc.
Also, this recent post by a psychologist who calls for "a world organized around care" tracks well with our calls for more care-centric frameworks, policies, and strategies:
https://dysregulationnation.substack.com/p/the-nervous-system-case-for-matriarchy
This is wonderful! And new to me, thank you. Maybe we should create a “care index” of people working on this and join forces somehow
Yes to your “create a “care index” of people working on this and join forces somehow.” I’ve hoped and waited for that. I’m in no position to host, etc. But eager to participate, contribute, etc. Should we continue discussing here or switch to email?
I created it. Try it out! https://airtable.com/appDikgEx8TK49H3c/pagWLEIhg4eYCGMyv/form
Good. I just filled out and submitted as a test. But where did it go next? To you for vetting? And where will we access the list of entries? Um, I forgot to save a copy for myself.
What if I make an online document for us and we can invite others to add and suggest as well ? Someone who come sto mind who has also reached out about care is https://substack.com/profile/21890695-illuminating-care?utm_source=account-card
Good to hear. Thanks. Yes to being familiar with Ostrom’s work.
I’ve thinking and writing about prospects for a fourth realm of society since mid-1990s, and about care-centric HEWE matters forming its core since early 2000s. Here’s how I wrote it up at times:
"As for HEWE matters, I keep looking for indications that actors in the fields of health, education, welfare, and the environment are beginning to talk together, make common cause, find mutual concepts, and develop a language around care that spans all their fields horizontally — much as civil-society, government, and business actors have done for their own realms of activity. And I’ve wondered what would happen if someone (not me) took the initiative to put some doctors, teachers, welfarians, and environmentalists in a room together and asked them to talk about their mutual concerns. Would they indeed find common cause around common good? Find ways to move ahead and be done with the debilitating talk of profits, losses, and investment returns that private insurance companies and venture capital firms currently prioritize? That’s what I’m looking for — a liberation and de-colonization of the terms of discussion around HEWE matters that leads to a “new sectorism” — and it seems the looking will go on for a while." (October 2025)
“Here’s my point: While all four matters — health, education, welfare, and the environment — are viewed and treated separately by analysts, policymakers, and other actors, there’s a key commonality that’s being overlooked. All four are about maximizing care: people care, life care, planetary care; the care of body, mind, and soul, individually and collectively. Plus, each activity affects the others; their dynamics and vectors interact. Better health can lead to better education, and vice-vera, especially if welfare and environmental conditions are improved as well.
“Furthermore, the set of policy principles and positions that may be raised for any one of the four is pretty much the same for all of them. For example, debates exist for all four as to whether it/they should be recognized as a legal right, whether to approach matters individually or collectively, how to protect against risks and vulnerabilities, etc.
“What I deduce from this is that health, education, welfare, and the environment have so many affinities and are so intertwined as policy problems that it will make increasing sense for policymakers and other actors to view them as a bundled set — and eventually as bedrock components for constructing a new care-centric realm (sector) of society.
“Today, even if that analysis may sound potentially sensible to some people, it will still seem like fanciful unwelcome academic speculation in many circles. As I’ve been told, government agencies and capitalist enterprises presently have “hammer-lock” grips on healthcare and education. There is no way they will let go in today’s political and economic environments, much less allow health, education, welfare, and environmental matters to be bundled. But I see a path opening up in the years ahead." (March 2025)
"Here’s my speculative deduction: If we view health, education, welfare, and the environment together, as a set, we can see that they are mainly about maximizing care, broadly defined: people care, life care, planet care, in a sense the care of body, mind, and soul. Viewed as such — as an enormously complex interrelated set of matters that our existing sectors are no longer suited to handling — they look like the most potent candidates for a prospective “fourth sector” — probably a “commons sector” — for our society, as well as for other advanced societies on the verge of evolving from triform into quadriform systems." (December 2020)
I hope that helps, clarifies. Apology for being long-winded [and for subsequent edits to reduce clutter]. But “attunement” to “care” as you argue is what I seek too.
Onward.
I really appreciate this David and it’s heartening to hear that you have been thinking through this and working on this. It is so important and there are many resonances. Is there anywhere you read more of your work?
Career work years:
https://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/r/ronfeldt_david.html
Retirement years:
https://twotheories.blogspot.com/
https://davidronfeldt.substack.com/
Wonderful, thank you.
So good - thank you for these offerings
Thank you 🙏 ❤️
Accounts from the earliest days of the Royal Society demonstrate enthusiasm for understanding, supporting each others explorations and discoveries, not simply in Britain but in correspondence across Europe. It was the collaboration that produced the stars.
The same has more recently been true of many literary and artistic movements, from impressionism to abstract expressionism to the music scenes of London, San Francisco, New York, Seattle.... When I took a class on The Literary History of the Beat Generation from Ginsberg, most all Allen talked about was how much they all cared for each other, far more than any details and specifics of the literature.
That is really interesting. Thinking through this historically in such a way seems like something someone could write a book about in fact. Did you ever frequent St Marks church or bookshop in the EV by chance?
The bookshop, often.
Which location? I worked there in the last one in the nyu building and used to housesit for Larry and Anne (across from where Ginsberg lived, though he was long gone by then alas)
The 3rd Ave iteration. First half of the 90s I lived in Italian Williamsburg; the EV was first stop on the L in Manhattan. I sometimes wondered if an ancestor having farmed there in the 1600s had something to do with my comfort in that neighborhood.
Oh wow what a time! I love the idea of thinking of farming ancestors of the city. Regarding St Marks: Did you Bob and Terry?
Didn't know 'em.
So happy the algorithm gods led me to your work. The things you’ve written and spoken and made are giving me an explanatory framework for my many disparate projects as an artist, which is HUGH. All of it makes sense through the lens of care, which is so easy to overlook because we’re not taught to look for it. Thank you for all of your time and care.
Thank you Shawna. This is so great. Would love to hear more about your projects sometime and how care matters there.