Care Ethics

Since approval of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2016, it has been widely and repeatedly claimed that a 'right to explanation' of decisions made by automated or artificially intelligent algorithmic systems will be legally mandated by the GDPR. This right to explanation is viewed as an ideal mechanism to enhance the accountability and transparency of automated decision-making. However, there are several reasons to doubt both the legal existence and the feasibility of such a right. In contrast to the right to explanation of specific automated decisions claimed elsewhere, the GDPR only mandates that data subjects receive limited information (Articles 13-15) about the logic involved, as well as the significance and the envisaged consequences of automated decision-making systems, what we term a 'right to be informed'. Further, the ambiguity and limited scope of the 'right not to be subject to automated decision-making' contained in Article 22 (from which the alleged 'right to explanation' stems) raises questions over the protection actually afforded to data subjects. These problems show that the GDPR lacks precise language as well as explicit and well-defined rights and safeguards against automated decision-making, and therefore runs the risk of being toothless. We propose a number of legislative steps that, if taken, may improve the transparency and accountability of automated decision-making when the GDPR comes into force in 2018.

Both responsibility and care have much to offer in thinking through the relationalities that make up a postcolonial world. Although contemporary political systems often posit responsibility and care within the context of individuated and autonomous selves, geographers have done much to relocate responsibility and care within narratives of interdependency – spatially and temporally. They have argued that both terms offer a route for thinking about ethical geographical relations between myriad places. In this article we take this project further, by looking at how the nature and shape of these relationships might be construed in a postcolonial world. We suggest that, through a more critical engagement with postcolonial thinking, any exploration of existing practices of responsibility and care will not only reveal the enormous potential of imagining these geographies as forms of existing and evolving relationalities, but will also lead us to interrogate the deployments of these terms in the context of past and present inequalities. We show that routing care and responsibility through postcolonial geographies moves us towards a more pragmatic responsiveness, one that involves a ‘care-full’ recognition of postcolonial interaction.

In a recent review article, Jeff Popke (2006, p. 510) calls for a ‘more direct engagement with theories of ethics and responsibility’ on the part of human geographers, and for a reinscription of the social as a site of ethics and responsibility. This requires that we also continue to develop ways of thinking through our responsibilities toward unseen others—both unseen neighbours and distant others—and to cultivate a renewed sense of social interconnectedness. Popke suggests that a feminist-inspired ethic of care might be instrumental in developing this expanded, relational and collective vision of the social, which is particularly prescient given the contemporary economic downturn throughout the globe. Thus, as the ‘moral turn’ in geography continues to evolve, this special issue seeks to bring together geographers working within feminist or feminist-inspired frameworks, and with a shared interest in the changing geographies of ethics, responsibility and care. The collection of papers has its origins in conference sessions on Care-full Geographies, organised by the Guest Editors at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in 2007. In this editorial we seek to position the papers within broader debates about care, responsibility and ethics that have emerged in geography and the wider social sciences in recent years, and to highlight the key issues that have framed these debates.

Communities of making have been at the center of attention
in popular, business, political, and academic research circles
in recent years. In HCI, they seem to carry the promise
of new forms of computer use, education, innovation, and
even ways of life. In the West in particular, the maker manifestos
of these communities have shown strong elements of
a neoliberal ethos, one that prizes self-determination, techsavvy,
independence, freedom from government, suspicion
of authority, and so forth. Yet such communities, to function
as communities, also require values of collaboration,
cooperation, interpersonal support—in a word, care. In this
ethnographic study, we studied and participated as members
of a hackerspace for 19 months, focusing in particular not
on their technical achievements, innovations, or for glimmers
of a more sustainable future, but rather to make visible
and to analyze the community maintenance labor that helps
the hackerspace support the practices that its members, society,
and HCI research are so interested in. We found that
the maker ethic entails a complex negotiation of both a neoliberal
libertarian ethos and a care ethos.

In March 2014 a group of early career researchers and  academics from São Paulo state and from the UK met at the University of Campinas to participate in a workshop on ‘Responsible Innovation and the Governance of Socially Controversial Technologies’. In this Perspective we describe key reflections and observations from the workshop discussions, paying particular attention to the discourse of responsible
innovation from a cross-cultural perspective. We describe a number of important tensions, paradoxes and opportunities that emerged over the three days of the workshop.

Anarchism is frequently considered to be alternatively a political ideology, a social movement or a form of political culture. Drawing on queer and feminist writings as my own experience both in anarchist politics and in sex education, I suggest that thinking of anarchism as an ethics of relationships is consistent with key elements of the tradition as well as offering fruitful insights for everyday relationships. Anti-state, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-hierarchical, anti-authoritarian, anarchism and other forms of radical politics are criticised for being anti-everything, begging the question, what is anarchism for? While on one hand offering utopian visions of life after capitalism, the anarchist tradition is also firmly grounded in everyday practices of relationships. In anarchist critiques of speaking for others and in practices of collective organising, I see a radical commitment to listening. In offering challenges to institutionalised competition and in demonstrating the benefits of mutual aid, I see a radical commitment to care. In undermining the 'false futures' of neoliberalism and stories of the 'end of history' and in practices of individual and collective empowerment and transformation, I see a radical commitment to becoming. As an ethics of relationships, anarchism might not only evade criticism as utopian or nihilist, it may provide a profound source of inspiration for the everyday challenges of our relationships with ourselves, each other and the earth.

In this article, we critically examine what a commitment to equity, diversity, and social justice in science and science education means for our research practices and methods. Using a blend of critical cross-cultural and feminist lenses, we explore relationships of power in our research, specifically in terms of knowledge production, representation, and positionality. We also consider our ethical obligations and relational responsibilities as researchers in terms of caring and solidarity. We argue that relevance should be measured as a function of the transformative impact of the research enterprise. We also argue that in order to do this, researchers need to examine and expose their own positioning and positionality. We propose a variety of strategies, drawn from our work and from that of many others, which illustrate how to build and sustain more caring, ethical, responsive and responsible relationships with research participants.

Dependency functions as a keyword in care theory. However, care theorists have spelled out the ontological and moral ramifications of dependency in different and often conflicting ways. In this article, I argue that conceptual disputes about dependency betray a fundamental discordance among authors, rooted in the empirical premises of their arguments. Hence, although authors appear to share a vocabulary of dependency, they are not writing about quite the same phenomenon. I seek to elucidate these differences by teasing out and comparing different conceptions of dependency found in the literature. Borrowing a phrase from Eva Kittay, I trace four "paradigm cases" of dependency: the infant, the physically disabled person, the profoundly intellectually disabled person, and the refugee. These paradigm cases serve as the empirical touchstone from which theorists extract their conceptions of dependency. Each paradigm case, moreover, permits (or even implores) a particular ethical sensibility toward care. How we understand and value dependency thus seems to determine how we understand and value care, and vice versa. In this way, I contend, our normative orientation toward care might influence what sorts of dependency we see-and, by extension, which forms of dependency we fail to notice.

The push for STEM has raised the visibility of engineering as a discipline which all students should learn. With the release of the Framework for K-12 Science Education and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), engineering now has an official place in the science curriculum. In both the Framework and the NGSS, engineering is framed as a way to solve the world's greatest problems. Despite this potential, there are troubling aspects in the way that engineering is presented in the Framework and NGSS and how engineering is taken up in the curriculum. In this paper, we use critiques of technocracy, utilitarianism, and neoliberalism to analyze the portrayal of engineering in the Framework and NGSS. We claim that the Framework and NGSS promote a technocratic perspective that all problems can be solved with engineered solutions, ignoring the socio-political foundations of many of the world's most pressing problems. Furthermore, both standards documents reflect a utilitarian ethic that promotes all progress as good and ignores issues of justice. Lastly, the Framework and NGSS betray neoliberal foundations that undermine education and engineering as public goods. To address some of these issues, others have argued for a greater emphasis on ethics. In response, we raise cautions because ethical framings present further intractable dilemmas. Instead, we draw on feminist theory to argue for reframing engineering education around an ethos of empathy and care. We call for a dimension of care that situates design problems in the full socio-political context and centralizes issues of justice. We provide an illustration of how an NGSS example activity for designing solar cookers could incorporate a dimension of care that addresses issues of power, inequality, and harm, providing students with opportunities to weigh and take responsibility for the real costs and benefits of their designs.

"Care robots" offer technological solutions to increasing needs for care just as economic imperatives increasingly regulate the care sector. Ethical critiques of this technology cannot succeed without situating themselves within the crisis of social reproduction under neoliberal capitalism. What, however, constitutes "care" and its status as a potential critical resource, and how might care robots damage this potential? Although robots might threaten norms of care, I argue that they are by no means necessarily damaging. Critiques of care robots must not entrench exclusionary images of the ideal carer. Instead, critical reflection on their use should trouble dominant paradigms of care.

The metaphor of “care drain” has been created as a womanly parallel to the “brain drain” idea. Just as “brain drain” suggests that the skilled migrants are an economic loss for the sending country, “care drain” describes the migrant women hired as care workers as a loss of care for their children left behind. This paper criticizes the construction of migrant women as “care drain” for three reasons: 1) it is built on sexist stereotypes, 2) it misrepresents and devalues care work, and 3) it misses the opportunity for a theoretical change about how skills in migration contexts can be understood.

Although the care of the self looms large in Michel Foucault's later works, his analyses are largely neglected in current debates on care. This may be due to the fact that Foucault's work has so far been read primarily as an ethics and aesthetics of the self, concerned less with common care activities than with individualistic practices of self-cultivation. Against this background, I argue that in Foucault the care of the self is pervaded by the presence of the Other. This becomes clear as soon as one links the care of the self with the concept of parrhesia, which signifies a form of truth-telling in which the individual confronting the Other with the truth constitutes herself as the subject of a discourse of truth. It is precisely by associating the care of the self with parrhesia that the genuinely critical and emancipatory potential of each becomes effective in the first place. This makes it possible not only to detach the concept of care from its close entanglement with the private sphere and to reframe it in political terms but also to envisage a critical attitude that is based both on the care of the self and others and on the concern for truth.

Political theory and philosophy need to widen their view of the space in which what matters politically takes place, and I suggest that integrating the conditions of sustainability of all affected-that is, all participants in nature's relations-is a necessary first step in this direction. New materialists and posthumanists have challenged how nature and politics have traditionally been construed. While acknowledging the significance of their contributions, I critically examine the ethical and political implications of their ontological project. I focus particularly on how the decentering of human agency that they advocate for raises a set of concerns that need to be addressed in developing an appropriate ecological ethics. I argue that the latter must be attuned to the vulnerability of living beings who participate in relationships that sustain life on earth. This brings me to conclude that qualitative distinctions between the worlds of bios and techne are necessary. This is because we need to think critically about ways of evaluating types of relationships so that we can assess them and establish which are worth nurturing and protecting and which are not.

Though the literature on care ethics has mushroomed in recent years, there remains much to be said about several important topics therein. One of these is action. In this paper, I draw on Anscombean philosophy of action to develop a kind of meta- or proto-ethical theory of caring actions. I begin by showing how the fragmentary philosophy of action offered by care ethicists meshes with Anscombe’s broader philosophy of action, and arguing that Anscombe’s philosophy of action offers a useful scaffold for a theory of caring actions. Following this, I defend an account of caring actions as those which aim to meet needs. I argue that care aims at satisfying eudaimonistic needs, those things without which one cannot flourish. I then consider the place of caring actions in care ethics. I suggest that, if caring actions are to be a starting point for an ethical theory, we ought to reject the notion that a caring action must bring about its intended consequences, and I show how the concept of practice better equips us to evaluate caring actions.

As the number of intrinsically unknowable technologically produced risks global society faces continues to grow, it is evident that the question of our responsibilities towards future people is of urgent importance. However, the concepts with which this question is generally approached are, it is argued, deficient in comprehending the nature of these risks. In particular, the individualistic language of rights presents severe difficulties. An alternative understanding of responsibility is required, which, it is argued, can be developed from phenomenological and fe minist concepts of care. Such concepts privilege an understanding of human beings that is primarily relational rather than individualistic, and show that responsibility is, in the first place, about connection rather than respecting separation. Care, by opening up for us an understanding of the diversity of values that are constitutive of a worthwhile life, also connects us to the future as the future of care. As such, it provides us with ethical resources that can guide us in the face of uncertainty, including general principles of action and the desire for institutions that can articulate them.

Empathy is a fundamental concept in health care and nursing. In academic literature, it has been primarily defined as a personal ability, act or experience. The relational dimensions of empathy have received far less attention. In our view, individualistic conceptualizations are restricted and do not adequately reflect the practice of empathy in daily care. We argue that a relational conceptualization of empathy contributes to a more realistic, nuanced and deeper understanding of the functions and limitations of empathy in professional care practices. In this article, we explore the relational aspects of empathy, drawing on sources that offer a relational approach, such as the field of care ethics, the phenomenology of Edith Stein and qualitative research into interpersonal and interactive empathy. We analyse the relational aspects of three prevalent components of empathy definitions: the underlying ability or act (i.e. the cognitive, affective and perception abilities that enable empathy); the resulting experience (i.e. empathic understanding and affective responsivity) and the expression of this experience (i.e. empathic expression). Ultimately, we propose four inter-related understandings of empathy: (a) A co-creative practice based on the abilities and activities of both the empathizer and the empathee; (b) A fundamentally other-oriented experience; (c) A dynamic, interactive process in which empathizer and empathee influence each other's experiences; (d) A quality of relationships.

Research with prisoners’ families is limited in the context of learning difficulties/disabilities (LD) and autism spectrum. Life-story interviews with mothers reveal an extended period of emotional and practical care labour, as the continuous engagement with their son’s education and experiences of physical and emotional abuse are explored. Prior to their son’s incarceration, mothers spoke of stigma and barriers to support throughout their childrearing, as well as limited or absent preventative/positive care practices. Subsequently prisons and locked wards seem to feature as a progression. Mothers have experienced abuse; physical and/or emotional, as well as lives that convey accounts of failure. Not their failure, but that of the systems. A care ethics model of disability assists an analysis of the narratives where care-less spaces are identified. Interrelated experiences merging emotional responses to extended mothering, the external forces of disabilism and destructive systems, lead to proposing a rehumanising of care practices within for example, education and the criminal justice system.

Ever since Big Data became a mot du jour across social fields, optical metaphors such as the microscope began to surface in popular discourse to describe and qualify its epistemological impact. While the persistence of optics seems to be at odds with the datafication of vision, this article suggests that the optical metaphor offers an opportunity to reflect about the material consequences of the modes of seeing and knowing that currently shape datafied worlds. Drawing on feminist
new materialism, the article investigates the optical metaphor as a material-discursive practice that actively constitutes the world, as metaphors imply modes of thinking, knowing and doing that have material enactions. Expanding visual culture theories, the notion of ‘optical unconscious’ is taken up to discuss the tensions between displacement and persistence of optics within datafied worlds, that is, how optical vision is displaced but also mobilised and repurposed by
data-driven knowledge. In dialogue with feminist science and technology studies and speculative ethics, I suggest that the datafication of vision offers a chance to reconceptualize the sense of sight towards a sensorial engagement with Big Data premised on responsibility, care, and an ethics of unknowability. Within this framework, vision may be conceived differently, perhaps not only as enhancement and control, but as generator of new possibilities. Ultimately, the article proposes that the visual theories after which Big Data is being imagined matter not only for our understanding of Big Data’s epistemic potential, but also for the possibility of shaping emerging data worlds.

There is a growing body of literature which marks out a feminist ethics of care and it is within this framework we understand transitions from primary to secondary school education can be challenging and careless , especially for disabled children. By exploring the narratives of parents and professionals we investigate transitions and self-identity, as a meaningful transition depends on the care-full spaces pupils inhabit. These education narratives are all in the context of privileging academic attainment and a culture of testing and examinations. Parents and professionals, as well as children are also surveyed. Until there are care-full education processes, marginalisation will remain, impacting on disabled children's transition to secondary school and healthy identity construction. Moreover, if educational challenges are not addressed, their life chances are increasingly limited. Interdependent caring work enables engagement in a meaningful education and positive identity formation. In school and at home, care-full spaces are key in this process.

Care ethics as initiated by Gilligan, Held,
Tronto and others (in the nineteen eighties and nineties) has
from its onset been critical towards ethical concepts established
in modernity, like ‘autonomy’, alternatively proposing
to think from within relationships and to pay attention
to power. In this article the question is raised whether
renewal in this same critical vein is necessary and possible
as late modern circumstances require rethinking the care
ethical inquiry. Two late modern realities that invite to
rethink care ethics are complexity and precariousness. Late
modern organizations, like the general hospital, codetermined
by various (control-, information-, safety-, accountability-)
systems are characterized by complexity and the
need for complexity reduction, both permeating care practices.
By means of a heuristic use of the concept of precariousness,
taken as the installment of uncertainty, it is shown
that relations and power in late modern care organizations
have changed, precluding the use of a straightforward domination
idea of power. In the final section a proposition is
made how to rethink the care ethical inquiry in order to take
late modern circumstances into account: inquiry should
always be related to the concerns of people and practitioners
from within care practices.

Domination, understood as the abusive or capricious employment of power over others for the sake of one's own ends, is among the gravest threats to human freedom. Solving the problem of domination is a crucial normative challenge, and this article identifies in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau a promising and overlooked avenue for addressing it. I propose an interpretation of Rousseau's Emile in which preventing domination requires moral education in the practice and value of care. This interpretation gives Rousseau new relevance as a theorist of domination. In connecting non-dominative to educative care, Rousseau's approach has the potential to forge new connections between neo-republican theories of domination and feminist care ethics, even suggesting new routes by which public policy might foster a non-dominative society.

One of the most striking and underexplored points of difference between care ethics and other normative theories is its reluctance to offer a theory of right action. Unlike other normative ethical frameworks, care ethicists typically either neglect right action or explicitly refuse to provide a theory thereof. This paper disputes that stance. It begins with an examination of right action in care ethics, offering reasons for care ethicists not to oppose the development of a care ethical theory thereof. It then considers some potential formulations of a first premise of a theory of right action, demonstrating both the diversity of possible first premises and arguing for a monistic subset of these. It subsequently presents some potential second premises, arguing that a care ethical theory of right action ought to adopt a eudaimonistic approach to care. The paper thereby makes several inroads into a care ethical account of moral evaluation. Since its first articulations in the early 1980s, care ethics has become the subject of a great deal of feminist and non-feminist theorising. In many circles it is now regarded as a genuine alternative to the leading normative theories of our time: consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. It is interesting that, in spite of its popularity and almost four decades after its advent, confusion remains over the place of care ethics in moral philosophy generally. Care ethicists have repeatedly laid claim to the novelty and superiority of their framework, and yet are still regularly (mis)classified as a subset of virtue

The concept of resident–facility fit has largely been used to illustrate whether a residential care facility and a resident are together able to meet requirements set by only the hampering functional abilities of the latter. The purpose of this paper is to study how assisted living residents perceive resident–facility fit. The data were gathered ethnographically from both observations and resident interviews in a sheltered home in Finland during 2013–2014. Perceived resident– facility fit is based on several relational factors that connect to both the residents as individuals and their surroundings. This fit seems also to be partly conditional and indeed depends on residents' trust in having their own potential to act. Good resident–facility fit results in feeling at home in a facility, whereas poor fit can even result in residents' feeling imprisoned. Care providers can thus utilize our results to affirm residents' quality of life in residential facilities.

The impacts of the activities of technological societies extend further into the future than does their capacity to predict and control these impacts. Some have argued that the repercussions of this deficiency of knowledge cause fatal difficulties for both consequentialist and deontological accounts of future oriented obligations. Increasingly, international politics encompasses issues where this problem looms large: the connection between energy production and consumption and climate change provides an excellent example. As the reach of technologically-mediated social action increases, it is necessary to ask whether a political imaginary that extends itself to match this reach requires new concepts, and how far they should displace traditional political concepts of obligation, based on reciprocity and harm avoidance. This paper draws on recent scholarship on the role of concepts of care in political philosophy, bringing together phenomenological and feminist concepts of care in contributing to a positive concept of non-reciprocal intergenerational obligation that defends a constitutive connection between care and justice.

Dependency is fundamental to caring relationships. However, given that dependency implies asymmetry, it also brings moral problems for nursing. In nursing theory and theories of care, dependency tends to be framed as a problem of self‐determination—a tendency that is mirrored in contemporary policy and practice. This paper argues that this problem frame is too narrow. The aim of the paper is to articulate additional theoretical ‘problem frames’ for dependency and to increase our understanding of how dependency can be navigated in practices of long‐term care. It does so by way of an empirical ethical analysis of how care professionals tackle the problem of dependency in group homes for people with intellectual disabilities. The paper refers to these practices of mitigating the problem of dependency as ‘dependency work’, a phrase borrowed from Eva Kittay. The analysis of dependency work suggests that for care professionals, dependency is a threefold problem: one of self‐determination, one of parity and one of self‐worth. These findings suggest that patient autonomy cannot be a full solution to the problem of dependency in long‐term care relations. But they also show that dependency as such is not a problem that can be solved, as attempts to mitigate it only serve to tighten the dependency relationship further. This is the paradox of dependency work.

In the Netherlands, physician-assisted dying has been legalized since 2002. Currently, an increasing number of Dutch citizens are in favour of a more relaxed interpretation of the law. Based on an ethos of self-determination and autonomy, there is a strong political lobby for the legal right to assisted dying when life is considered to be completed and no longer worth living. Building on previous empirical research, this article provides a critical ethical reflection upon this social issue. In the first part, we discuss the following question: what is the lived experience of older people who consider their lives to be completed and no longer worth living? We describe the reported loss of a sense of autonomy, dignity and independence in the lives of these older people. In the second part, from an ethics of care stance, we analyse the emerging social and political challenges behind the wish to die. Empirically grounded, the authors argue that the debate on ‘completed life in old age’ should primarily focus not on the question of whether or not to legitimize a self-directed death but on how to build an inclusive society where people may feel less unneeded, useless and marginalized.

This paper is about three working class women academics in their 40s, who are at different phases in their career. I take a reflexive, feminist, (Reay 2000, 2004, Ribbens and Edwards 1998) life story approach (Plummer, 2001) in order to understand their particular narratives about identity, complicity, relationships and discomfort within the academy, and then how they inhabit careless spaces. However unique their narratives, I am able to explore an aspect of higher education – women and their working relationships – through a lens of careless spaces, and argue that careless -ness in the academy, can create and reproduce animosity and collusion. Notably, this is damaging for intellectual pursuits, knowledge production and markedly, the identity of woman academics. In introducing this work, I first contextualise women in the academy and define the term careless spaces, then move onto discuss feminist methods. I then explore and critique in some detail, the substantive findings under the headings of 'complicity and 'faking' it' and 'publishing and collaboration'. The final section concludes the paper by drawing on Herring's (2013) legal premise, in the context of care ethics, as a way to interrogate particular careless spaces within higher education.

Population, Space and Place.  22, 705–717 (2016)
See a more recent version at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/psp.1953/epdf

Tracing the continuously changing dynamics between China and its quasi-independent capitalist ‘special territory’, Hong Kong, this paper brings together the under-recognised cross-border caregivers and over-recognised care consumers in the wake of multiple care crises, articulating how internal and international migration clashes in the borderlands crossed by various kinds of travelling mothers from the Mainland. With a focus on care as social practices and relations, it observes how the boundary between internal and international migrations shifts and multiplies as care is alienated, displaced, and commodified. To understand the mobility and multiplicity of borders, it adopts an integrated framework that links internal and international migration studies, and more importantly, attends to care. A transnational perspective on the dynamics of mobile, unpaid care labour, as they play out within the boundaries of the same, recently ‘re-integrated’ country, further suggests that attention must be paid to the conceptual terrains and lived experiences of those who live and move in-between internal and international migration regimes, especially the invisible caregivers who frequently travel across borders.

Care is traditionally researched in ECEC as a dyadic, human phenomenon that relies heavily of tropes of females as care providers. The assumption that care is produced in dyadic relationships occludes material care practices that occur beyond the dyad. Drawing on Bernice Fisher and Joan Tronto's care ethics and Karen Barad's focus on the agency of materiality, I have sought to explore how care is produced outside of dyadic relations in ECEC and how that care relates to domestic practices and flourishing in ECEC.

It has been argued that social technology assessment requires critique of the ‘worlds’ implicated in the future imaginaries through which expectations take shape around new technologies. Qualitative social science research can aid deliberation by exploring the meanings of technologies within everyday practices, as is demonstrate by Yolande Strengers’ ethnographic work on everyday energy use and imaginaries of ‘smartness’. In this paper, we show how a novel combination of narrative interviews and multimodal methods can help in exploring future imaginaries through the lens of biographical experiences of socio-technical changes in how energy is used domestically. In particular, this approach can open up a critical space around future socio-technical imaginaries of smartness and convenience by exploring the investments that individuals have in different forms of engagement with the world and the relationship between these forms and particular technologies. Using a psychosocial framework that draws on theoretical resources from science and technology studies, we show how these investments can lead to shifts in the meaning of taken-for granted assumptions about the meaning of concepts like convenience, and how valued forms of subjectivity may be conceptualised as emerging out of the ‘friction’ of engagement with the world.

Discourses of love, care and maternalism affect the everyday lives of children enrolled in early childhood education. These discourses bear witness to the ontological transformation that has occurred since the Romantic era that birthed the kindergarten movement to today. Reflecting on historical discourses of love, care and maternalism from the Romantic era, this article considers how the historical development of these discourses affects our professional understandings of love, care and maternalism in early childhood education.

One dimension of music education and community music activity remains virtually unexamined: the homeschooled community. The purpose of this research was to examine the nature, values, and teaching-learning strategies of the North Jersey Homeschool Association (NJHSA) Chorale. This case study, conducted over a period of three months, chronicled numerous musical and social interactions of the NJHSA Chorale. Analyses of the data revealed four themes related to this organization's nature, values, and teaching-learning processes: care, community, cultural pluralism, and spirituality. The conclusions of the study include (but are not limited to) the following: the aims and values of the NJHSA Chorale resonate with central issues in contemporary educational philosophy and with central aims of community music in particular (e.g., music making for life-long learning and for community well-being).

As teacher educators, the authors developed an assignment focused on care ethics to prepare teacher candidates to design classroom-management procedures aimed at cultivating caring community. The teacher candidates revised traditional classroom-management processes, such as class rules, into cocreated norms. They also designed original management processes to explicitly teach their students to care. The findings point to the promise of care ethics to prepare teachers who can manage classrooms in ways that better meet the needs of diverse students.

I develop the foundation for cosmopolitan care, an underexplored variety of moral cosmopolitanism. I begin by offering a characterization of contemporary cosmopolitanism from the justice tradition. Rather than discussing the political, economic or cultural aspects of cosmopolitanism, I instead address its moral dimensions. I then employ a feminist philosophical perspective to provide a critical evaluation of the moral foundations of cosmopolitan justice, with an eye toward demonstrating the need for an alternative account of moral cosmopo- litanism as cosmopolitan care. After providing an explanation of how care ethics in connection with Kantian ethics generates a duty to care, I consider one main feature of cosmopolitan care, namely the theory of obligation it endorses. In developing this account, I place special emphasis on the practical ramifications of the theory by using it to analyze gender violence in conflict zones.

This article examines the recent transformations of the Italian welfare state from a familist welfare model to what I term transnational market familism. In this model, families buy in care labour, commonly provided by migrant workers. There is now a growing literature exploring both the transformations of the Italian welfare model and the experiences of migrant workers providing care in Italy. However, what has been overlooked in the current literature is the ethical aspect of this model of welfare provision, which is part of the transnational political economy of care. The article analyses the ethical implications of the migrant-in-the-family model, which transforms the care relationship between the caregiver and care receiver into a complex relationship between the family member organising care, the migrant caregiver and the dependent care receiver. The context of such welfare provision is transnational. Examining this care triangle, I draw on care ethics and individualization perspective for an analysis of how social policies safeguard, or overlook, human interaction and care relationships in the context of global hierarchies. The article draws on ethnographic data gathered in Naples, Italy, during 2004Á 2005, including interviews with Neapolitan employers and elderly care-receivers, interviews with migrant workers, as well as participant observations.

Il termine care non evoca solo la dimensione morale e l'attitudine ad agire al di là di una logica economica volta alla massimizzazione dell'utilità, ma anche quella pratica del lavoro di cura, in cui la capacità di attenzione, sollecitudine e preoccupazione verso l'altro sono considerate qualità essenziali. Proprio intorno a quest'ultima dimensione pratica dagli inizi degli anni novanta si è concentrata la cosiddetta seconda generazione dell'etica della cura, che dal piano morale si è spostata sempre più decisamente sul terreno politico. Con questo riposizionamento l'etica politica della cura è tornata di fatto a recuperare una questione, anche economica, che era stata già al centro della lotta politica femminista negli anni settanta, in particolare nell'ambito del femminismo marxista, ovvero quella, in termini generalissimi, del rapporto fra sistema produttivo e sistema riproduttivo. Se le femministe degli anni settanta prefiguravano l'emergere di una tensione fra lo spazio e i tempi della vita sociale e la logica del sistema produttivoquindi della stessa struttura economica fondamentale delle società occidentali almeno, al limite di tutte le società -oggi si vede bene come il dispiegarsi della colonizzazione del privato da parte del mercato produca effetti che investono contemporaneamente tre spazi: quello dell'esistenza quotidiana, quello statuale e quello globale, con un progressivo confondersi e, insieme, ridisegnarsi, dei confini tra pubblico e privato.

Drawing on the theory of the Paradigm of Governing and the Paradigm of Dwelling by the philosopher Fernández-Savater, this paper attempts to theorise a spatial politics of care through an ethnographic analysis of three grassroots initiatives-a social kitchen, an accommodation centre with refugees and a community centre-set up in Athens (Greece) as a counter-response to the crisis politics via austerity enforced in the country (2010-2018), as well as to the renewed EU border system (2016). The everyday politics of these self-organised groups is conceptualised as a Politics of Dwelling. The concept refers to a form of political praxis and capacity forged within the sphere of social reproduction and everyday life. It is argued that Dwelling as politics holds an emancipatory potentiality beyond capitalist relationships, which lies in (1) its situated/embodied nature, which marks collective processes of decision-making and organisation with an ethics of care, (2) the central role that space and material resources play in those processes.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758221078597

How do we theorize the experiences of caregivers abused by their children with autism without intensifying stigma toward disability?  While Eva Kittay emphasizes examples of extreme vulnerability to overturn myths of independence, she ignores the possibility that dependents with disabilities may be vulnerable and aggressive. Instead, her work over-emphasizes caregivers’ capabilities and the constancy of disabled dependents’ vulnerability. I turn to Judith Butler’s ethics and her conception of the self as opaque to rethink care amid conflict. Person-centered planning approaches pioneered by disability rights activists, merge Butler’s analysis of opacity with Kittay’s work on embodied care, while also inviting a broader network of people to both interpret needs and change communities. By expanding our conceptions of dependency, feminist disability studies can continue the aim of both Kittay and Butler: to humanize unintelligible lives.

In this article we argue that menthol-containing products, like chewing gums, vapour rubs and mouthwashes, are used as moral things within everyday practices. They take on moral functions because of how their material qualities contribute to sensory experiences. Specifically, we focus on scenarios in which menthol products become associated with the moral work of care and highlight the temporal dimension of what people do with moral things. We review the literature on morality as a practical, everyday accomplishment and stress the embodied nature of caring practices to outline how care is bound up with sensory experience. We draw on rich qualitative data generated through creative methods, including film, photography and sketching, as part of object-elicitation interviews, focus groups, home tours and ‘pop-up stalls’. We develop three concepts regarding the function of moral things: manifesting, anchoring and conserving moral relations to describe how time, morality and the sensory are entwined.

Indigenous ethics and feminist care ethics offer a range of related ideas and tools for environmental ethics. These ethics delve into deep connections and moral commitments between nonhumans and humans to guide ethical forms of environmental decision making and environmental science. Indigenous and feminist movements such as the Mother Earth Water Walk and the Green Belt Movement are ongoing examples of the effectiveness of on-the-ground environmental care ethics. Indigenous ethics highlight attentive caring for the intertwined needs of humans and nonhumans within interdependent communities. Feminist environmental care ethics emphasize the importance of empowering communities to care for themselves and the social and ecological communities in which their lives and interests are interwoven. The gendered, feminist, historical, and anticolonial dimensions of care ethics, indigenous ethics, and other related approaches provide rich ground for rethinking and reclaiming the nature and depth of diverse relationships as the fabric of social and ecological being.