Care in Fragments: Ecologies of Support Beyond Repair

Writing almost two years into a global pandemic response gone wild (ripe with vaccine colonialism, securitarian nationalism, and blatantly unequal exposure to the virus), with public infrastructures in shambles, amid the splintering effects of ­ decades of neoliberal policies and centuries-­ long settler and white supremacist vio­ lence, it seems pretty safe to suggest that care is falling to pieces. Care, a series of practices by which life is supported and made to thrive, is in fragments. When dealing with such a state of affairs, care thinking can become complicit with a tendency to subsume care, and indeed the organization of collective life, ­ under a proj­ect of repair understood narrowly as a mere recovery of lost function. But what if taking care beyond repair entailed attending to fragmented lives without any hope of return to a lost unity or to a retrieved “normality”? Even in fragments, care demands to be defended—­ perhaps, even, especially in fragments. The often disempowering or weakening effects of fragmentation are well documented. In this chapter, however, we examine how fragmentation may also give rise to, intensify, and pluralize the relations that hold and support lives—­ precariously composing what we call “ecologies of support”. By exploring fragments and their afterlives, we aim to contribute to thinking about fragility not merely in the negative form of a loss, as the notions of ruins, degradation, or decay tend to pose. Rather than drawing from the reparative and restorative approaches that often haunt maintenance and repair studies, this chapter focuses on the endurance of fragments and how they may multiply and unfold in unexpected ways.