Mr Ryan Frazer1
1University Of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia
This paper offers an intervention within geographical conceptualisations of care. Following the work of Parvati Raghuram (2016), I seek to open a conversation around current engagements with care ethics, suggesting they risk depoliticising, displacing and delimiting care by overlooking the different that place makes. In response, I outline an alternative approach to care as a guiding political principle, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophy and their call to ‘play between planes’: between experimentation and institutionalisation. To illustrate my arguments, I draw on empirical data from a project on volunteers working within an organisation in a small city that provides resettlement services to refugees, and which focuses on the provision of personable and practical support with everyday activities.
Biography:
Ryan Frazer is a PhD candidate in the School of Geography and Sustainable Communities at the University of Wollongong. His research draws on the work of Deleuze and Guattari to explore the geographies of care that emerge through volunteer engagement in refugee resettlement. He also works as Associate Research Fellow in Indigenous Studies at Macquarie University.