The Caring‐With Practitioner
Diffracting Practice‐Research Dynamics in Urban Care
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22018461 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Claire McAndrew (0000-0001-7747-881X, University College London), Jonathan Orlek (0000-0003-0835-1852, Liverpool John Moores University), Cristina Cerulli (0000-0002-4669-5624, University of Reading) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 10 |
| Publication date | 2025-09-10 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Urban Planning (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2183-7635 • E-ISSN: 2183-7635 |
| Publisher | Cogitatio (PUBLISHER • PT) |
| DOI | 10.17645/up.10055 |
| OpenAlex | W4414111558 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 40 |
This article casts a light on the role of practitioner‐researchers working towards more caring cities within an expanded set of actors. By introducing the caring‐with practitioner, we draw attention to engaged, relational, and constitutively entangled forms of practice within urban care discourse. This contributes to professional practice scholarship (within urban planning, built environment, and design professions) by intersecting theory on/in practice with contemporary discourses around care. The article revisits interview transcripts from a British Academy‐funded project, Caring‐With Cities (2021–2022), in which practitioners working across policy and community‐led contexts discuss efforts to shift power dynamics within the urban realm. We also draw on our own experiences as design practitioner‐researchers embedded within collaborative projects that seek to put “caring with” (Tronto, 2015) theories into practice. Through diffractive inquiry (Barad, 2007), the article moves beyond established modes of thinking about practice‐research dynamics, which often use reflection‐in‐action/reflection‐on‐action (Schön, 1983) or conceptualise the practitioner as mediator (Forester, 1987). Set against design debates on difference and the pluriverse (Escobar, 2018), the caring‐with practitioner adds to and challenges thought on working in partnership to engage across difference. We contribute to an epistemology of practice founded on acts of caring‐with. The caring‐with practitioner operates not only through the apparatus of practice‐research, but through an intra‐active entanglement with the apparatuses and boundary‐drawing practices of others. To practice in this way involves holding multiple roles that are co‐emergent and mutually constitutive across projects and organisations, drawing attention to and determining what comes to matter
General partnership · Practice theory · Scholarship · Urban theory · Mental Health and Patient Involvement · Participatory Visual Research Methods · Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics
Design, When Everybody Designs
Designs for the Pluriverse
Who Cares?
Planning in the Face of Power
Planning In the Face of Conflict
Performing Porosity
Conflux of interest. Revealing multiple value systems in socially motivated collaborative university based projects
Posthumanist Performativity
Doing Academia Differently
Political Desirings
Assemblage and critical urbanism
Diffracting Diffraction
Cities of care
Diffraction as a Method of Critical Policy Analysis
Doing time and motion diffractively
Diffracting diffractive readings of texts as methodology
Cities of care
The Mushroom at the End of the World
Situated Knowledges
Being embedded
Beyond an Easy Sense
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |