: Practices of experimenting, tinkenring with, and arranging people and technical aids

The starting point of this article is the debate between Disability Studies researchers and the theorists of the ethics of care about the notion of care, with the former rejecting it and the latter defending it in order to construct an ethic. Whilst at first sight these two movements are in opposition to each other, they are based on an identical conception of care as a relationship of dependency between an active carer and a passive receiver of care. Analysis of wheelchair tests opens up a different conception of care. In this case, care is a shared work, carried out jointly by the collective. It revolves around assembling and arranging the entities of a collective so that they fit together. To care is to tinker, i.e. to meticulously explore, “quibble,” test, touch, adapt, adjust, pay attention to details and change them, until a suitable arrangement (material, emotional, relational) has been reached. The work of care involves a transformation of what these entities are, of their materiality and their sensations, of what they do and, above all, of the way in which they are linked to one another