The research arrives at a moment when “caring communities” have become a buzzword in social policy across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, often invoked as a vision for aging societies in which family, market, and state provision all fall short. Saltiel and Strüver argue that most of this debate focuses on top-down, formally organized local care networks, while overlooking the countless self-organized initiatives — community kitchens, homeless support, refugee hosting, shared childcare — that emerge from below out of sheer necessity. These “shadow care infrastructures,” as other scholars have termed them, respond to the unequal distribution of care resources, yet they are rarely treated as more than stopgaps for failed welfare regimes.

To build their framework, the authors bring two theoretical traditions into dialogue that rarely speak to each other. From Judith Butler they take the distinction between precariousness and precarity: the insight that all humans are fundamentally interdependent and vulnerable — a shared existential condition — while political and economic structures distribute that vulnerability unequally, exposing particular groups to violence, exclusion, and abandonment. From Joan Tronto they draw the ethics of care and the concept of “caring with,” the idea that because everyone begins and ends life dependent on others, the allocation of care responsibilities must be negotiated collectively rather than left to families, markets, or institutions. Situated within a post-structural materialist framework, this synthesis links macro-level inequality to micropolitical practices of everyday life.

The empirical heart of the study comes from six years of qualitative and ethnographic fieldwork in Brussels, conducted by Saltiel between 2016 and 2022. She examined two initiatives coordinated by the Plateforme Citoyenne de Soutien aux Réfugiés, a civil society platform with more than 15,000 volunteers. The first was the informal camp in Maximilian Park, where asylum seekers, undocumented migrants, students, church groups, pensioners, and managers alike built and sustained a temporary settlement. The second was Hébergement, launched via Facebook in autumn 2017, which matched precarious migrants — many of them undocumented and therefore excluded from state reception — with private households willing to host them.

The scale of Hébergement is striking. More than 10,000 households have hosted homeless migrants since 2017, providing roughly 50,000 overnight stays in its first year and nearly 100,000 in the following one. What began as a one-night gesture frequently evolved into longer stays and durable personal relationships. Hosts and guests shopped, cooked, ate, and washed dishes together; they cared for each other during illness, looked after children, and took responsibility for homes, plants, and pets. Participants often described one another in familial terms — hosts addressed as “Mama,” or relationships described as sibling-like — a linguistic move that redefined what “family” and “stranger” could mean.

In the camp, meanwhile, the authors observed how care roles dissolved rather than reinforced the familiar dichotomy between “generous citizens” and “passive, grateful supplicants.” Volunteers were marked by yellow safety vests, and residents of the camp itself — including asylum seekers and undocumented migrants — became volunteers in their own right, running a kitchen and organizing food rescue. One collective of undocumented migrants wrote “Sans-Papiers” on their vests in black marker, a performative assertion of their presence and their role as care providers. Community membership, the authors argue, was produced through the act of caring itself rather than through any criteria of exclusion, forming what they call an “alliance of cohabitation.”

Language itself became a site of political intervention. In the Facebook groups of the Plateforme Citoyenne, volunteers coined the term VNOUS, fusing the French “vous” (you) and “nous” (we) into a single word that blurred the boundary between helper and helped. The neologism spread into the platform’s official communication and even became the title of a 2019 documentary. The authors read this as more than symbolism: naming practices, like the familial terms used in hosted households, are performative acts that rework belonging and challenge racist and nationalist constructions of “us” and “them,” even if such linguistic shifts alone cannot dismantle structural inequality.

The study is careful not to romanticize. The authors note that these communities remain ambivalent and fragile. The high visibility of the camp in a public park generated political pressure on local government, whereas Hébergement moved the problem of unprovided-for people into private homes, rendering it invisible and potentially relieving policymakers of responsibility — a dynamic that echoes critiques of the informalization and deprofessionalization of care work. Paternalistic patterns, in which helpers demand proof of “deservingness” from the helped, can also reappear within volunteer initiatives. The authors insist that such ambivalences are not arguments against these communities, but reminders that they operate within, and against, existing power relations.

What the Brussels cases ultimately demonstrate, Saltiel and Strüver argue, is that community is not a precondition for care but one of its products. These “other caring communities” define themselves not by boundary-drawing or homogenization but by the mutual recognition of shared precariousness and interdependence — what Butler calls a politics of alliance and what the activist collective Precarias a la Deriva termed an affective citizenship bound to care rather than to the nation-state. They are agile and fragile at once, temporary yet transformative, renegotiating social relations and experimenting with forms of togetherness beyond capitalist, familial, and institutional arrangements.

The authors close with a call to treat other caring communities not merely as a social policy concern but as an epistemic perspective — a lens that connects micro-practices of everyday care to macro-structural conditions and expands debates on welfare, provision, and socio-spatial justice. Key open questions remain: whether such improvised arrangements will harden into lasting care infrastructures or remain temporary responses to acute crises, and how gendered, racialized, and classed power relations are reproduced or disrupted within them. In a world of deepening care crises, the everyday practice of strangers caring with one another may be less a utopia than a live experiment in how societies could be organized differently.

Subject of Research: The formation of self-organized caring communities among refugees and volunteers in Brussels

Article Title: Sorgende Gemeinschaften: Performative Praxis des Miteinander-Sorgens

Article References: Saltiel, R., & Strüver, A. (2026). Sorgende Gemeinschaften: Performative Praxis des Miteinander-Sorgens. Geographica Helvetica, 81(3), 481-496. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-81-481-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gh-81-481-2026

Keywords: caring communities, ethics of care, precarity, refugee support, Brussels, volunteering, social reproduction, care crisis, performativity, feminist geography, mutual aid, informal care

The theoretical foundations of relational pedagogy run deep. The approach is grounded in the ethics of care, most famously articulated by Nel Noddings, and in dialogical philosophy, particularly Martin Buber’s distinction between I-Thou relationships—characterised by authenticity, openness, empathy, and presence—and I-It relationships, marked by detachment and objectification. It also draws on Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of responsibility to the other. Within this tradition, education is conceived as a lifelong relational process shaped through ethical encounters between persons, in which knowledge, learning, and teaching exist within a shared reality co-constructed by students and educators. The educator’s intuitive and ethical responsiveness to students’ situated experiences becomes nothing less than a moral core of pedagogy. Rather than treating students as passive recipients of transmitted content, relational pedagogy invites them to become active partners in the learning process, establishing trust, engagement, and reciprocity as the mechanisms through which understanding develops.

The empirical case for such an approach is considerable. Pedagogical relationships shape how students perceive their study environment, influence academic achievement, and have even been regarded in some research as more significant than the lecturer’s subject knowledge. Yet contemporary academic cultures—defined by workload pressures, expanding student numbers, and mounting administrative demands—often constrain lecturers’ capacity to engage relationally. Mental health and well-being problems are reported across the academic hierarchy, from early-career faculty to senior positions, reflecting widespread institutional and structural stressors. Students face parallel challenges. Recent Swedish studies indicate that final-semester students in healthcare and social work programmes reported declining sense of coherence and reduced health-promoting behaviours over time, while students across cohorts continued to report low general health and well-being. These converging trends, Lood argues, highlight an urgent need for educational environments that support meaningful relational engagement, belonging, and shared responsibility.

Occupational therapy is a particularly fertile ground for this pedagogical philosophy. The discipline’s core values—meaning-making, participation, and relationality—mirror the principles of relational pedagogy almost exactly. Students are expected to develop not only theoretical and practical knowledge but also relational capacities such as reflexivity, presence, and attuned communication, capabilities that echo the therapeutic use of self long described in clinical practice. The approach also overlaps with sociocultural learning theory, which frames learning as participatory and dialogical, and with constructivist perspectives that view learners as active agents constructing knowledge through experience and reflection. Relational pedagogy builds on these traditions by foregrounding the ethical and affective dimensions of educational encounters, positioning relational quality as a key mechanism through which students engage, participate, and ultimately learn. It resonates too with broader shifts in healthcare toward person-centred and integrated care, reinforcing the importance of cultivating relational competence before practitioners ever reach a clinic.

To explore how these ideas translate into everyday teaching, Lood conducted four individual interviews with senior lecturers at a Swedish occupational therapy programme built on student-activating pedagogy, which encourages students to actively search for knowledge and take responsibility for their own learning. The lecturers had between nine and thirty years of teaching experience, and the interview guide addressed what relational pedagogy means, views on lecturer-student relationships, relationships in an era of digitalised education, and the facilitators and barriers to human connection and dialogue in higher education. Transcripts were analysed using qualitative content analysis as described by Graneheim and Lundman, with preliminary categories refined through collegial discussion, engagement with previous literature, and reflexive notes informed by the author’s own eight years of teaching experience. The analysis yielded two central categories: learning as a co-created occupation, and relational pedagogy as a foundation for deep learning and professional development.

The first category reframes learning itself as a shared, jointly produced activity. Lecturers described relational pedagogy as an active, mutual process built on engagement, trust, and responsiveness—a deliberate shift away from traditional, authoritative teaching toward collaboration and participation. Lecturers and students share responsibility for the learning process, and outcomes emerge through dialogue rather than unilateral delivery. One lecturer summarised this reciprocity as “a giving and taking all the time,” capturing the distributed expertise and shared decision-making at the heart of the approach. In practice, this meant cultivating safe and inclusive environments by being relationally present, inviting students’ experiences into discussions, and using dialogical prompts to stimulate two-way communication. As another lecturer put it, “It concerns not just the what but the how in our work”—pedagogical content and relational quality were treated as inseparable. Importantly, this relational work extended beyond individual lecturer-student encounters to the wider relational ecology of the programme, including relationships within and between student groups and among colleagues, where shared pedagogical aims and collegial coherence reinforced collaboration and collective responsibility.

The second category connects relational teaching to deep learning and professional identity formation. Deep learning, in this framing, means the integration of theory and practice, critical reflection, and understanding that becomes personally meaningful within occupational therapy contexts. One lecturer described the shift from factual acquisition toward professional and personal becoming: “It is about getting the students to understand that it is not only about knowledge, but also about a different approach. To develop as a human being and that it is a road you travel together.” This echoes established research showing that supportive, dialogical environments promote deep approaches to learning, characterised by integrated understanding rather than superficial reproduction. Lecturers also noted that modelling relational engagement—presence, attentive listening, ethical sensitivity—positions relational competence as an integral part of becoming an occupational therapist. The benefits flowed back to educators as well: relational encounters sparked reflection on teaching values and were described as sustaining and mutually enriching, with students reportedly able to “feel when we talk to each other and have shared goals.”

Yet the study is equally clear about the forces working against relational pedagogy. Large cohorts and heavy workloads limited opportunities for dialogue and personalised engagement. Hybrid and digital learning formats weakened relational attunement, with lecturers mourning the loss of body language, informal pre- and post-class interactions, and spontaneous dialogue, and expressing uncertainty about students’ engagement when cameras stayed off. These challenges align with concerns raised by Felten and Lambert that hybrid education can intensify disconnection if relational structures are not deliberately designed. Lecturers responded experimentally, with small-group formats, guided reflection, and open online “drop-in” spaces that supported informal contact—and proved valuable on campus as well. Institutional pressures compounded the difficulty: efficiency demands, standardisation, and surveillance-oriented performance cultures reduced the time and space needed for relational teaching. The approach also exacted a personal toll, demanding emotional labour and vulnerability as lecturers balanced openness with professional boundaries and navigated group conflicts under workload pressure.

The overall conclusion is that relational pedagogy must be understood simultaneously as practice, ethos, and challenge. It can be enacted through intentional strategies—attentive listening, shared reflection, relational availability, and facilitation of peer collaboration—and it demonstrably supports deep learning and professional formation. But its sustainability depends on institutional and collegial support, because it requires time, emotional investment, and pedagogical intentionality rather than discretionary individual effort. Lood argues that higher education systems should move beyond competitive and individualistic approaches and recognise the relational dimensions of teaching and learning as central rather than peripheral. When institutions acknowledge the time, care, and emotional labour involved, lecturers can draw on their professional and experiential knowledge to treat students as credible contributors of knowledge, cultivating inclusive and collaborative learning environments that align with occupational therapy’s core values—and offering a model that other health professional disciplines, and perhaps higher education more broadly, would do well to study.

Subject of Research: The application of relational pedagogy in occupational therapy education

Article Title: On relational pedagogy in occupational therapy education: What it is and why it matters

Article References: On relational pedagogy in occupational therapy education: What it is and why it matters. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1080/11038128.2026.2613622

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1080/11038128.2026.2613622

Keywords: relational pedagogy, occupational therapy education, higher education, ethics of care, dialogical philosophy, student engagement, collaborative learning, deep learning, professional identity, digital learning, emotional labour, co-creation of knowledge