In this essay, I use Maria 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 Pug 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 have not yet worked out my allegiance. The second is the invitation I do want to accept: to reflect on my efforts at research and writing and to ask in what ways these amount to "matters of care." In doing so, I take seriously both Puig de la Bellacasa's insistence on fostering care for neglected things, and the openness her speculative thought provides regarding how to care and how caring affects our involvement in our scholarly work.
