Caring with: positioning social support in landscapes of care

Informal caring is often framed as an individualised activity, with support networks positioned as peripheral rather than integral to sustaining care. This paper challenges such framings by theorising social support as a structuring force within landscapes of care, shaping how informal dementia caring is organised, negotiated, and experienced. Drawing on qualitative interviews and graphic elicitation with carers, the study foregrounds ‘caring with’ to explore the co-participatory, distributed, and relational dimensions of caring. While landscapes of care have been widely used to explore how care unfolds across social and spatial contexts, limited attention has been given to how carers themselves are supported within these landscapes. The findings reveal that community actors, such as friends, neighbours, and community networks, not only alleviate carer burden but actively co-produce care, redistributing responsibilities and reconfiguring caring relationships. By centring social support within landscapes of care, this paper calls for a repositioning of social support in studies on care: not as an adjunct to care, but as fundamental to how care itself is sustained and negotiated over time.