This edited volume offers a contemporary rethinking of the relationship between love and care in the context of neoliberal practices of professionalization and work. Each of the book's three sections interrogates a particular site of care, where the affective, political, legal, and economic dimensions of care intersect in challenging ways. These sites are located within a variety of institutionally managed contexts such as the contemporary university, the theatre hall, the prison complex, the family home, the urban landscape, and the care industry. The geographical spread of the case studies stretches across India, Vietnam, Sweden, Brazil, South Africa, the UK and the US and provides broad coverage that crosses the divide between the Global North and the Global South. To address this transnational interdisciplinary field of study, the collection utilises insights from across the humanities and social sciences and includes contributions from literature, sociology, cultural and media studies, philosophy, feminist theory, theatre, art history, and education. These inquiries build on a variety of conceptual tools and research methods, from data analysis to psychoanalytic reading. Love and the Politics of Care delivers an attentive and widely relevant examination of the politics of care and makes a compelling case for an urgent reconsideration of the methods that currently structure and regulate it.

Love and the Politics of Intimacy articulates the concept of love within the relationship between the intimate and the social, rethinking how intimacy is conceived and experienced in the context of 21st-century neoliberalism. Reflecting on experiences of intimate, romantic and sexual love, and the role of individual identity, these essays explore historical trajectories that have culminated in particular, contemporary experiences of intimate love. Politically, this work links identity and articulation of the self to liberatory practices in the arenas of friendship, romance and sex. This interdisciplinary exploration of what love means in the 21st century incorporates academic writing and original creative work from established and emerging scholars around the globe. Essays from across the humanities and social sciences - including literary studies, sociology, psychology, philosophy and gender studies - interrogate the role of relational intimacy on topics of 'Love and Romance', 'Love and Liberation' and 'Love and Technologies of Intimacy'. The volume looks at the past, present and future in search of inspiration for transforming and re-charting the pathways of love, seeking a more diverse and emancipatory model of social life and what it would take to restore love to social and institutional spaces.