Nishida, A. (2022). Just Care: Messy Entanglements of Disability, Dependence, and Desire. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Review by Kaat Kenis

In Just Care: Messy Entanglements of Disability, Dependency, and Desire, Akemi Nishida offers a critical and deeply personal examination of care as a political, economic, and relational practice. She challenges the dominant narratives that idealise independence and frame dependency as a personal failure. By centering the lived experiences of those engaged in daily care work, she reveals how neoliberal policies commodify care and reinforce racialized, gendered, and ableist structures of oppression. Nishida unpacks the entangled relationships between care workers and care recipients, showing how the very systems designed to support them often result in mutual debilitation. At the same time, she argues that care is not just a site of exploitation – it can also be a powerful space for resistance.