Caring for Life: A Postdevelopment Politics of Infant Hygiene

In order to mitigate the worst forecasts of climate change, many of us need to make drastic adjustments to how we live and what we consume. For Kelly Dombroski, these changes must also happen in the home: in rethinking routines of care and hygiene that still rely on disposable and plastic products. Caring for Life examines the remarkable evolution in Asia-Pacific hygiene practices and amplifies the creative work of ordinary people guarding human and more-than-human life in their everyday practices of care.

Caring for Life is a call to action, a theory of change, and a fascinating account of the transformational possibilities of care practices. It shows how experiments in personal care can lead to collective, widespread change, ultimately providing a practical and hopeful vision for environmental action.

“Listening to and learning from others in the pluriverse” is how Miriam Williams characterises Caring for Life. For more on Miriam Williams' extended review, click here. 

"Caring for people and planet should go hand-in-hand but mostly do not. Embracing global multiplicity and diversity in hygiene, health, and care assemblages, Kelly Dombroski offers hopeful and creative paths to socioecological change by guarding human and more-than-human life. This is a transformative book for our troubled times and essential for research on contemporary care practices."—María Puig de la Bellacasa, author of Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds

"Kelly Dombroski has written a brilliant book on hygiene as the ‘guarding of life.’ With great honesty, she sets out the possibilities for environmental and social change in a thought-provoking treatise on how to shift from resource-intensive and waste-producing practices to the flourishing of human and nonhuman life, beginning with an appreciation for infant hygiene practices in out-of-the-way places. A must-read for all of us striving to multiply possibilities for planetary transformation and communal wellbeing."—Wendy Harcourt, International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam