In this article, we conceptualize housing as an infrastructure of care. Drawing on the recent infrastructural turn in social sciences we understand infrastructures as dynamic patterns that are the foundation of social organization. New infrastructural analyses attend to how infrastructures pattern social life and identify the values that are selectively coded into infrastructures, (re)producing social difference through use. We argue that housing patterns care across three domains: through housing materialities, markets and governance. First, we identify how housing patterns the organization of care at a household and social scale. Second, we attend to the relational politics of care through housing, asking how care is ordered through housing and to whose benefit. Third, we consider where and how care is located in housing. This third direction opens a substantively new approach in housing scholarship, identifying housing as a sociomaterial assemblage that is constitutive of care. We provoke housing researchers to ask: is this a housing system that cares?

The last fifty years have seen dogs increasingly drawn into the home as family members. While the health and social implications of these relatings have been the focus of much research, the everyday practices by which more-than-human families are constituted have received little attention. The paper draws on interviews with, and diaries recorded by, new dog owners in 2006–2007. It highlights three ways that dogs became family in and through the home. First, describing dogs as ‘furry children’, participants emphasised the time spent caring for dogs. Second, engaging with dogs as ‘pack animals’, participants discussed an inherent ‘otherness’ that shaped family relations, and reconceptualised the human-family as a pack relation. Third, the individual agency of dogs was recognised as shaping family and home. However, these familial relatings were often tenuous as humans were faced with the particular character and ‘otherness’ of dogs. While the majority experienced a strengthening of family ties following the introduction of a dog, a number of individuals discussed the divisive impact of this experience. The paper extends debates about family and home, broadening family beyond biological relations to include more-than-human relationships forged through cohabitation and interaction.

This study reports on current aphasia rehabilitation practices of speech-language pathologists in Australia. A 30-item web-based survey targeted approaches to aphasia rehabilitation, education, discharge, follow-up practices, counselling, interventions to improve communication access, community aphasia support services, and challenges to practice. One hundred and eighty-eight surveys were completed representing ~33% of the potential target population, with 58.5% urban and 41.5% rural participants across all states and territories. Respondents reported embracing a wide variety of approaches to aphasia rehabilitation; however, significant challenges in providing aphasia management in acute and residential care were identified. Low levels of knowledge and confidence were reported for both culturally and linguistically diverse clients and discourse approaches. Group and intensive services were under-utilized and clinicians reported inflexible funding models as major barriers to implementation. Few clinicians work directly in the community to improve communicative access for people with aphasia. Despite the chronic nature of aphasia, follow-up practices are limited and client re-entry to services is restricted. Counselling is a high frequency practice in aphasia rehabilitation, but clinicians report being under-prepared for the role. Respondents repeatedly cited lack of resources (time, space, materials) as a major challenge to effective service provision. Collective advocacy is required to achieve system level changes.

In a period when care is being cast as an individual responsibility there is a need to invigorate analyses of caring capacity, of the factors and relations that make care possible. This paper develops caring‐with as an analytic to guide analyses of caring capacity. Caring‐with brings feminist care ethics together with assemblage thinking. It innovates from Tronto's identification of “caring with” as the fifth phase of care to figure care as a generative sociomaterial relation that is productive of and emergent through assemblages of actors who are not always supportive of care. Caring‐with advances three frames for conceptualising caring capacity. First, caring‐with situates care in a sociomaterial and performative frame. Second, it places care in a temporal frame, speaking to the historical and generative depth of relations that are the foundation and future of care. Third, it theorises the production and translation of care across space. These concepts are empirically examined through the caring experiences of single older women living in precarious housing in Sydney, Australia. Interviews with these women show how housing assemblages shape the emergent potential for care, co‐constituting the capacity for individuals to take part in caring practices (for self and others) and to achieve basic care needs (including needs for food, energy, and appropriate housing). Caring‐with provides a framework for conceptualising caring capacity in unequal worlds and illuminates the adaptive and creative agencies that generate and hold care together. It also points to new ways of conceptualising caring responsibility as a distributed achievement. Finally, caring‐with suggests an approach to conceptualising housing within care research.

Economic restructuring and welfare reform are driving new forms of urban poverty in the global north. Shadow care infrastructures is a new frame for conceptualising the complex and interconnected practices through which marginalised people seek survival in this context. It remaps welfare landscapes across a continuum that includes formal and informal, established and improvised practice, the not-for-profit sector, informal community networks and exchange and the black market. Conceptually, it centres the care practices that sustain life and the infrastructures that sustain them. Activating a ‘shadow geographies’ tradition it foregrounds care infrastructures that are necessary, but rarely visible within, welfare discourse.