Reimagining Care in Times of Crisis: Embodied Care, the Evolution of Care and Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy

This article examines Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003–2013) as a literary exploration of radical care in times of crisis. The trilogy presents care as a relational, embodied, and adaptive force whose evolution is affected and also transforms the ethics and material environments. This evolutionary process, driven by the ongoing interaction of ethics, practice and infrastructure, reveals how storytelling works as a form of care infrastructure – offering space for speculative exploration, training sensibilities towards diverse life forms, archiving survival knowledge, and cultivating collective awareness. By portraying care as a dynamic, embodied and situated interaction, speculative fiction such as the MaddAddam trilogy offers critical resources for reimagining care beyond the normative constraints and precarities of the contemporary moment.