Caring for Past Research: Singapore, Eye Health Care, STS, and Me

In this essay, I use María Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2017) book Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds as a provocation to revisit what came of my fieldwork on eye images, health care, and biomedical innovation, conducted in Singapore between 2010 and 2014. In the book’s presentation of care in three dimensions — labor/work, affect/affections, and ethics/politics — and how these connect but cannot be reduced to one another, I hear two invitations. The first is the invitation to engage with posthumanist and feminist thought, brought together by Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2017: 2) vision of care as one that “requires decentering human agencies, as well as remaining close to the predicaments and inheritances of situated human doings.” I will not take up that invitation; it is too dense with particular STS legacies to which I...