Beyond Care: Plural Ethics in Fractured Urban Worlds

Drawing on ethnographic research in urban Chile, this paper examines how children navigate and reconfigure cities shaped by infrastructural neglect, social abandonment, and everyday outbreaks of violence. Attuned to the entanglements of people, places, and material environments, we explore how children co-produce urban relationalities that both sustain and strain everyday life. Our methods include walking interviews, creative mapping, mobile conversations, and interviews with parents and teachers. Instead of viewing care as a normative good, we consider it one of many ethical formations – alongside neglect, improvisation, endurance, and spatial withdrawal, among others. By focusing on urban atmospheres, infrastructures, and trajectories, we highlight how children cultivate place-based ethics that are not easily constrained by existing care frameworks. This paper challenges dominant theories of care, including those within more-than-human and relational traditions, by illustrating how care is often partial, contingent, or inadequate. This study contributes to more-than-human social work and post-anthropocentric ethics by examining how cities shape ethical life. We advocate for a plural, situated understanding of relationality that resists idealized notions of care and instead centers on the everyday ethical improvisations that arise from living in fractured and unequal urban landscapes.