In this introduction, and indeed this special section, we explore care as a morally ambiguous and relationally unstable set of practices. By exploring care over longer temporal frames and across shifting subjectivities and intersubjectivities, we show how enactments of care are often unsettled by the transforming dynamics of relationships across time and often entail a multiplicity of competing affects and aspirations, such as hope and failure, love and resentment, pragmatism and utopianism, and connection and disconnection. We thus suggest an analytic approach to care that questions care as either morally suspect or morally virtuous and instead allows for the compromised, shifting, and ambiguous dimensions of care practices to take center stage. [care, anthropology, temporality, subjectivity] Caring for another and being cared for is often messy, both emotionally and physically. Informed by broader politico-economic conditions, mundane, longterm care relationships may involve daily labor and aspirations toward the "good life," but they are rarely, if ever, settled. This collection of seven short, ethnographically rich papers explores diverse contexts in which care is theorized as unsettled in three ways. First, diverse temporal perspectives inform daily care practices, including varied orientations to the past, present, and future. Second, care relationships unfold and transform over time and exploring this necessitates an understanding of the transforming ethics, politics, pragmatics, and socialities that shape the possibilities for care. Third, experiences of caring and being cared for ebb and flow across the life course, with individuals occupying shifting, often multiple, roles as both subjects and objects of care. Although care relationships are often enduring and mundane, they remain unpredictable, containing the possibility of both suffering and hope, and although such practices change over time, moments of felicity or catastrophe are rarely final. As such, we understand giving and receiving care to be in situ enactments of long-term transformations of human relationships, informed by fantasies of futurity and post hoc perceptions of experience. Ethnographically, our emphasis on unsettled care involves following people in and out of their encounters with care regimes and locating care within broader relationships and values. This vantage point reveals the ways in which people fulfil different and ever shifting therapeutic and relational roles of care in particular moments (e.g. Herring 2020). Unsettled Care thus seeks to problematize the boundaries implied by the roles of "care giver" and "care recipient," and explores the
