This paper argues that housing is an infrastructure of care and points to the capacity of housing systems to advance a social project of caring with – supporting rather than hindering caring activities and responsibilities. The paper identifies a series of concerns that should be central to a housing system that cares. First, housing systems that ‘care with’ enable housing as a multi-scalar location through which to give and receive care; second, they support connections between housing, home and well-being. Third, caring housing systems are underpinned by a networked understanding of responsibility. Where in our homeownership society responsibility is placed predominately on the individual to secure their own housing through home purchase, or to bare the risks of a failure to do so, a caring system would identify a broader network of responsibility, engaging critically with the diverse actants shaping the caring capacities of the housing system, including government, home owners, tenants, property investors and landlords (both government and non-government), alongside home ownership cultures and housing related policies at all scales. The paper argues that at present these conditions are not being met, with the caring capacities of housing instead strongly allocated along tenure and income lines.

In the highly charged debates around childbirth, most contributors choose an allegiance to either a ‘medical birth’ or a ‘natural birth’. While the so-called ‘birth wars’ hinge on neat emotive arguments about what is right, or safe, or good, women and their carers must encounter one another across much more messy and diverse experiences of birth. The medical technologies of modern obstetrics are often assumed to be allied with practices of ‘medical birth’, that is, birthing care focused on: providing a ‘safe’ birth that avoids unnecessary ‘risks’, close monitoring of mother and foetus, and unhesitating introduction of technological solutions to a difficult labour. Based on interviews conducted in Australia and New Zealand, this paper seeks to disrupt the usual binaries of the ‘birth wars’ by exploring how such technologies are caught up in a more complex assemblage of care. How the tools of the obstetrician be resignified when placed within a community economies of care? How would obstetric technologies be understood if positioned among multiple actors (human and non-human) that contribute to shaping well-being at the beginning of life? How do CTGs and scalpels engage in the relations and practices of ‘caring with’ childbirth?

While New Zealanders are apparently passionate about the NZ environment their ability to take action, to manaaki whenua, to care for the land directly depends on their Capacity to Care. This Capacity to Care is both an individual and a collective capacity; it is vulnerable to changing trends in society and is not adequately addressed in bio-security and biodiversity strategies. This paper outlines a line of inquiry providing rare ethnographic insight into specific knowledge-practice achievements shaping people’s Capacity to Care for New Zealand’s environment. Positioned within and across a number of research projects addressing ecosystem based management, biodiversity restoration and bio-security the presentation highlights how knowledge and practices shaping New Zealander’s engagements with environmental management are being co-produced. The Capacity to Care framework is presented as a way to extend out of debates about environmental values to address questions of agency and to identify what the actual potentiality is for caring for NZ’s environment.

As a particular form of relational support, ‘caring with’ is an important dimension of student learning in the contemporary university. Drawing on multi-year observations regarding the relational dynamics of student learning, I suggest that ‘caring with’ is most evident when teacher and student are able to collaborate with respect on learning projects of shared interest. This kind of learning dynamic, I contend, depends upon attunement, mutuality and hospitality. Attunement is about the recognition of a student’s personhood and state of being, with a corresponding modulation of one's own subjectivity as a teacher. Mutuality is about each party being valued and respected, and their learning preferences taken into account. Hospitality is about offering welcome to students with diverse backgrounds, aptitudes and identities. I explore the significance of these three factors – attunement, mutuality and hospitality – for the learning experiences of undergraduate and graduate students. In doing so, I highlight a number of factors that work against the emergence of ‘caring with’, including the commercialisation of higher education, large class sizes, and the tendency of university bureaucratic systems to erase the personhood of both student and teacher. The analysis underscores the significance of ‘caring with’, both within and beyond higher education.