Stories as infrastructure: storytelling, care and carelessness in response to a supervised injecting room

We argue that stories serve as care infrastructures, which pattern how people care about, for and with other people and places. Care is ordered through stories by positioning individuals and places as worthy or not of receiving care, and by situating the responsibility and capacity to provide care with certain actors. Through stories people make sense of, rationalise and justify practices of care and carelessness. And stories, as care infrastructures, are produced, maintained or reshaped through practices of storytelling. We explore the concept of stories as infrastructure through a case study of North Richmond-Abbotsford, Melbourne. Stories told in the media have long portrayed this neighbourhood as a dangerous place of public injecting, poverty and crime. Recent stories highlight the tensions posed by locating a medically supervised injecting room in a residential neighbourhood. This paper draws on local news articles relating to the medically supervised injecting room alongside semi-structured interviews with diverse women living in the neighbourhood and testimonials from two residents’ group advocacy websites. Using narrative analysis, we explore how different forms of storytelling intersect to produce, maintain or reshape infrastructures of care. We show how, as infrastructures, stories de/legitimate practices, policies and materialities of care in the neighbourhood.