Ethics of care across professional and everyday positionalities: The (un)expected impacts of participatory video with young female carers in Slovakia

•We explore vectors of care in a collaborative participatory video project with teenage female carers in Slovakia.•Research underpinned by ethics of care is likely to generate impacts beyond initial expectations.•In turn, we question the distinction between academic and non-academic collaborations.•We argue for legitimising diverse forms of knowledge, action and impact in institutional policies.•We call for conceiving research projects from the beginning as “more-than-research”. The paper offers a critical intervention into the debates on research impact, theorising the potential of underpinning research agendas by ethics of care. We explore how a range of vectors of care, both intimate and distant, emerged in collaborative activities between researchers based in the UK and community youth workers and teenage female carers in Slovakia, leading to a series of (un)expected outcomes. We argue that while all research impacts cannot be planned in advance, an ethics of care embedded in relationships within and beyond research settings may form conditions in which outcomes exceeding the initial expectations can be anticipated. To achieve this, we argue for questioning the distinctions between academic and non-academic collaborators, legitimising diverse forms of knowledge, action and impact in institutional policies, and for conceiving research projects from the beginning as “more-than-research” avenues.