Introduction: Complexities of Care and Caring

This introduction situates our special issue’s focus on care, as concept and practice, within several lineages of feminist scholarship to grapple with the difficulties of the present moment. Over the past four decades of feminist scholarship and practice, notions of care and caring, as noun and verb, have had great traction across disciplinary divides, spurring debates about power and positionality while challenging binaries of equality and difference, public and private, the rational and irrational, and paid and unpaid labor. It is in the differing institutional, national, and community contexts explored in this issue that new perspectives on the complexity of care and caring emerge.