Democracy Care in the Neoliberal City: The Ambivalent Ethics of Caring in an Uncaring World

Suppose an act of caring can be at once good, even admirable, and still help sustain a system that harms people and our shared world. In this paper, I reflect on interviews with street-level bureaucrats working with civil society to maintain and repair collective capacities for problem-solving and collective reflection in segregated Swedish cities. I want to explore how seeing their work as a form of care – as caring for democracy – may help address the responsibility and distribution of the labor of ‘making democracy work.’ The interviews also draw attention to the ambiguous function of caring: while caring is good in a caring society, it is frustrating in an uncaring one. Where care workers cannot challenge the terms of care, they can only choose either to withdraw, thereby causing direct harm to people even as they expose systemic flaws, or carry on and cooperate, even if it means supporting a flawed, unjust system.