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A Feminist Public Ethic of Care Meets the New Communitarian Family Policy
... Moreover, most of the recent developments and applications of a political theory of care-especially in the field of public policy and public ethics-that occurred over the past two decades were clearly prefigured in the seminal works of the 1990s (e.g. Tronto 1993;Sevenhuijsen 1998;Kittay 1999). This is why we want to suggest moving beyond the schematism of the widely spread categorisation of care ethics' generations and rethinking the complex development of care ethics with a special focus on the prominent role of a political concept of care. ...
... In the context of Western political theory, at least in its modern version, citizenship has been a central normative ideal for human personhood, whereas care was considered as a matter of private life that lies outside the scope of the questions concerning citizenship. A political theory of care, in contrast, places the considerations regarding care firmly in the public domain and incorporates care, vulnerability and interdependency into the concept of a 'normal' subject of politics, as Eva Feder Kittay (1999) puts it in accord with Sevenhuijsen. The content of the careoriented notion of citizenship differs from both the liberal and the neoliberal notion by including caregiving and care-receiving on the list of 'primary social goods'. ...
... 10 As a key notion in political theory, the notion of citizenship is closely linked to the notion of equality, for at least in the modern liberal view all citizens are conceived as fundamentally equal in terms of their individual rights and duties. Sevenhuijsen (1998) and Kittay (1999), drawing on the feminist criticism of the liberal idea of equality as sameness (Okin 1979;Fineman 1991) and Tronto's analysis of a political concept of care (Tronto 1993(Tronto , 1996, propose a revised care-oriented notion of equality. A political theory of care reveals that the failure to secure the conditions of good caregiving and care-receiving in a society impairs the capability of manyespecially the most vulnerable and dependent ones-to participate as equals in an otherwise well-ordered society. ...
This chapter introduces the historical and conceptual contexts of a moral and political theory of care. One of the main stories about care ethics is that it began in moral psychology with Carol Gilligan 1982, then it slowly made its way into the realm of theorising about the social and political and engaged in debates in political theory only in the 1990s. This chapter offers a different story about care ethics by demonstrating that the social and political dimension of care was a focus of care ethics from the outset and received an explicit attention of care ethicists as early as about the mid-1980s. The chapter advocates moving beyond the schematism of the distinction of care ethics’ two generations and rethinking the complex development of care ethics with a special focus on the prominent role of a political concept of care. Finally, the chapter discusses the recent developments in a political theory of care and highlights its aspects that are most relevant to contemporary political and societal issues, such as the rise of neo-populist politics and the destructive effects of global neoliberalism.
... It is this reproductive feature of care that has been highlighted in the feminist literature with Streuning (2002: 87), for example, describing care as a social practice which is "essential to the maintenance and reproduction of society." Other references to this effect have been made by Annette Baier (1994) and Eva Feder Kittay (2001aKittay ( , 2001b among others. Perhaps in echoes of Marx, Sibyl Schwarzenbach (1996) frames this in terms of what she calls "reproductive labor," which refers to "rational activities" such as addressing others' needs, for example cooking meals, administering medicines, etc., that maintain or preserve a set of loving relationships between individuals over time. ...
... In trying to capture the essence of care we have attempted to convey its complexity as well as its contested definition. The ubiquitous nature of care as at once instinctive and hence natural (Churchland, 2011) and yet also socially constructed, thus learned (Held, 2006;Kittay, 2001a;Schwarzenbach, 1996;Sevenhuijsen, 2000;Tronto, 2013). We have investigated how care may be manifest in a series of practices, and how care can be pivotal to individual development. ...
... For instance, like Noddings and Watson, Diemut Bubeck (1995) considers that care is constituted by face-to-face encounters between a caregiver and receiver -the relational element is critical. Moreover, for Bubek the distinguishing feature of care rests on dependency (see also, for example, Engster, 2005Engster, , 2007Holloway, 2006;Kittay, 2001aKittay, , 2001bKittay et al., 2005). For example, undertaking a task for children who cannot meet their need themselves, such as cooking a meal, is a caring activity, whereas cooking the same meal for another adult capable of undertaking the activity is not care but a "service." ...
The analytical approach of standard health economics has so far failed to sufficiently account for the nature of care. This has important ramifications for the analysis and valuation of care, and therefore for the pattern of health and medical care provision. This book sets out an alternative approach, which places care at the center of an economics of health, showing how essential it is that care is appropriately recognized in policy as a means of enhancing the dignity of the individual. Whereas traditional health economics has tended to eschew value issues, this book embraces them, introducing care as a normative element at the center of theoretical analysis. Drawing upon care theory from feminist works, philosophy, nursing and medicine, and political economy, the authors develop a health care economics with a moral basis in health care systems. In providing deeper insights into the nature of care and caring, this book seeks to redress the shortcomings of the standard approach and contribute to the development of a more person-based approach to health and medical care in economics. Health Care Economics will be of interest to researchers and postgraduate students in health economics, heterodox economists, and those interested in health and medical care.
... Esta asunción de antemano, reconoce la reciprocidad entre el cuidador y el receptor, puesto que el cuidado no es a priori, más bien, es dependiente de una experiencia y deseo universal, pues todos necesitamos cuidado (7,8) . Esta relación de interdependencia que supone el cuidado es definido culturalmente como las acciones dirigidas a otros para satisfacer sus necesidades, es decir, son una idea moral no abstracta, y corresponden a una actividad que no es solamente afectiva, pues se comporta como una acción social que pretende producir bienes y servicios para la supervivencia (7)(8)(9)(10)(11) . ...
... Esta asunción de antemano, reconoce la reciprocidad entre el cuidador y el receptor, puesto que el cuidado no es a priori, más bien, es dependiente de una experiencia y deseo universal, pues todos necesitamos cuidado (7,8) . Esta relación de interdependencia que supone el cuidado es definido culturalmente como las acciones dirigidas a otros para satisfacer sus necesidades, es decir, son una idea moral no abstracta, y corresponden a una actividad que no es solamente afectiva, pues se comporta como una acción social que pretende producir bienes y servicios para la supervivencia (7)(8)(9)(10)(11) . ...
En nuestros días, aún los feminicidios no cesan, los cargos de poder siguen ocupados por una mayoría masculina, la protección de los hijos, de los adultos mayores y de los discapacitados, en muchos hogares y comunidades, sigue siendo una responsabilidad exclusiva de las mujeres, como tantas de las injusticias de género que no superamos en Colombia y en el mundo, es decir, el pasado no nos abandona. Actualmente, los pueblos indígenas siguen en riesgo de extinción por todos los tipos de violencias, el Estado colombiano no ha sido capaz de garantizar sus derechos fundamentales, mientras sus territorios son forzadamente utilizados por grupos armados ilegales, para actividades criminales, y por la industria que extrae recursos naturales.
... Savremeni feminizam u velikoj mjeri je izgradio nelagodnu korelaciju s komunitarizmom s kojim dijeli, prije svega, osnovu kritike liberalizma (Kittay, 2001;Hekman, 1992;Weiss, 1998). Načelno, feminizam i komunitarizam (koji je se u ovom radu razmatra u dosta širokom kontekstu) kritikuju liberalizam iz istih razloga. ...
... Recent advances in the ethics of care aim to improve care on a political and global scale. Diemut Bubeck, Eva Feder Kittay, and a number of others argue that care must now be regarded as a public issue, as opposed to a private obligation of women and private charities (Held 2006: 18;Kittay 2001). All of them support the notion that the ethics of care, with its core values of empathy and compassion, and care for those in need, should be a driving force in law, politics, and even international relations. ...
The paper examines the historical context of ethics of care in early
Christian discourse. The historical context of the ethics of care enables us
to comprehend the ways in which ethics of care was employed and disseminated
as part of political ideology and public discourse, significantly
influencing the social relations of the rapidly changing Roman world between
the fourth and seventh centuries. The Byzantine Empire is a prime example of
a political entity in which philanthropy was the driving force behind
imperial politics and social relations. Emperor Justinian’s laws, which
proclaimed social justice and protection for those in need, serve as a case
study for an ethics of care. Also, the ethics of care is reconfigured within
the context of Byzantine theology as a theology of care, in which the
primary virtue of a true Christian is his fervent love for the community
(agape). The ethics of care is then examined from the perspective of gender
and the newly established cult of the Theotokos, which degendered the
concept of maternal thinking and maternal care by making it a universal
experience and the new moral code for all Christians.
... The feminist literature on care as a gendering aspect of citizenship is vast, and therefore cannot be fully analysed here (Barnes 2007;Fineman 2009;Folbre 2011;Fraser 2009;Kittay 2001;Kittay and Feder 2002;Lister 1997Lister /2003Lutz 2011;Noddings 2002;Sevenhuijsen 1998;Tronto 2011Tronto , 2013. There is now a growing literature in this field describing care in terms of active and interactive forms of political citizenship, advancing the feminist slogan 'the personal is political' to develop more explicitly intersectional and global accounts of care as a tool to visualise other forms of citizenship as they develop. ...
This bilingual volume explores struggles and regimes of belonging and discusses "inclusive citizenship" as a concept that connects academic analysis with political struggles for belonging. Original contributions and conversations by international researchers and activists focus on the tensions between acts and regimes of citizenship. Highly political questions of agency arise in relation to freedom of movement, digital rights, belonging, care, and language. We discuss these with reference to local, regional, digital or (trans-)national spaces. The contributions deal with current migration movements to and in Europe, critical racism and (queer) feminist activism as well as institutional and everyday discrimination in unequal societies.
... The feminist literature on care as a gendering aspect of citizenship is vast, and therefore cannot be fully analysed here (Barnes 2007;Fineman 2009;Folbre 2011;Fraser 2009;Kittay 2001;Kittay and Feder 2002;Lister 1997Lister /2003Lutz 2011;Noddings 2002;Sevenhuijsen 1998;Tronto 2011Tronto , 2013. There is now a growing literature in this field describing care in terms of active and interactive forms of political citizenship, advancing the feminist slogan 'the personal is political' to develop more explicitly intersectional and global accounts of care as a tool to visualise other forms of citizenship as they develop. ...
In this introduction to the edited volume, we argue that citizenship is a “momentum concept” (Hoffman 2004, Citizenship Beyond the State, Sage, Thousand Oaks) which encompasses the potential to build up spaces for equality and inclusion. We aim to further develop the concept of inclusive citizenship, which is a common working base at the Leibniz Research Center for Inclusive Citizenship (CINC) at Leibniz University Hannover. Gender and race are two pivotal dimensions of inequality which have received public attention in recent years, for example, within debates on racist police violence in the USA and Europe, and in the care crisis, not only during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this introduction, we elaborate on our understanding of acts of inclusive citizenship, linking debates on migration and racism in Germany with concepts from citizenship studies, explain the focus on gender and race of this collaborative publication project and embed it in the field of intersectionality research. We also present the four fields of discussion of inclusive citizenship in this volume: care, institutional racism, language and the digital sphere.KeywordsCritical citizenship studiesInclusive citizenshipGenderRaceInequalityIntersectionality
... Quando uma mulher é responsável pelo cuidado, torna-se vulnerável, visto que dependerá de outros para o sustento ou renda. Conforme destaca Kittay (2001), a mulher acaba por ser impedida de desfrutar do status completo de cidadania, uma vez que a estrutura social e econômica é voltada para as pessoas que são iguais e independentes. Ao obliterar a existência do cuidado, a política exclui as pessoas cuja dependência é inevitável em decorrência da idade, habilidade e/ou deficiência. ...
A epidemia do Zika vírus, vivenciada no país a partir de 2015, fez com que os números de casos de crianças nascidas com deficiência múltipla com graves sequelas aumentassem abruptamente, alterando as vidas maternas. Este artigo é uma parte da dissertação de mestrado intitulada “Mães de Pessoas com Deficiência Múltipla: experiências vividas no itinerário do cuidar”. A pesquisa objetivou identificar as concepções das mães que foram entrevistadas sobre a deficiência. O referencial teórico aborda conceitos da Teoria Crítica da Sociedade, especialmente os estudos de Theodor Adorno, Marx Horkheimer e Marcuse em interlocução com estudos de Goffman e Crochík. O estudo foi realizado na cidade de Ilhéus (BA) e foram entrevistadas oito mães que foram infectadas pelo Zika vírus. Foi uma investigação empírica, de abordagem qualitativa do tipo História Oral, onde analisamos como a mãe foi informado sobre o diagnóstico do(a) filho(a) e qual a concepção materna sobre a deficiência. Os resultados apontaram para uma forte influência do modelo médico na concepção materna sobre deficiência e a necessidade de políticas sociais que incluam uma formação ampla para toda a família, pois a atenção está voltada apenas para a deficiência.
... Dean, 2009;Deneulin & McGregor, 2010;Iversen, 2003;Zimmermann, 2006). Individuals only exist because they are members of networks of care and responsibility, dependent on others (Kittay, 2001;Sevenhuijsen, 1998). While Nussbaum (1997Nussbaum ( , 2000Nussbaum ( , 2003 develops a list of central interrelated capabilities which includes 'affiliation'; this has been argued to be abstract, with the 'person' and 'the other' framed as abstract bearers of capabilities (Dean, 2009, p. 268). ...
In this article, we provide a balanced critique of Sen’s Capability Approach (CA) with reference to its potential to inform career guidance theory and practice. There are varying understandings and interpretations of the CA. Some see capabilities as universal, whilst others favour a more relativist view. The CA is also vulnerable to misunderstanding. Critiques based on misunderstanding are easily dismissed, so our focus is on substantive conceptual and practical critiques. Three main challenges are explored: conceptual debates about the nature of freedom and justice; limitations arising from the disciplinary origins of the CA; and challenges in operationalising the CA.
... Analyses from within care ethics of social justice therefore tend to focus on where responsibility for looking after others fall, and how these responsibilities are distributed across societies (e.g. Engster, 2007;Kittay, 2001;Tronto, 1993). A narrative understanding of change, particularly one that prioritises narratives articulated by subjects of need themselves (Sevenhuijsen, 2003), is thus often seen as methodologically necessary. ...
Inequalities in access to energy services are seen as unjust because of how they can prevent people from realising core human capabilities. Capabilities are inherently relational, being embedded within complex interdependencies between people and socio-material systems. These complexities can cause problems for approaches to energy justice that base themselves on concepts of rights. We argue that the ethics of care, with its emphasis on relationality as the ground of obligation, and particularly on how social relationships are bound up with power and responsibility, can assist. Care ethicists distinguish between different forms of dependency, some necessary and others oppressive. Using qualitative longitudinal methods as a way exploring people’s experiences of energy challenges and energy vulnerability can show how the distribution of power and responsibility within relationships can change over time. With data from a longitudinal community study in South Wales, we explore how everyday energy-using practices can become entangled over time with harmful forms of dependency. We show how the everyday ethical evaluation of these relationship undertaken by participants harmonises with the ethics of care. Our data draws attention to how relationships of dependence within the energy system are understood by interviewees in terms of responsibility and irresponsibility, rather than rights.
... We also offer a clarification: It may seem as if our focus is on two distinct categories, the caregiver and the care receiver. However, we see people, including children, always engaged in an "infinite spiral of relationships" (Kittay, 2001, quoted in Barnes, Brannelly, Ward, & Ward, 2015 as both givers and receivers of care in multiple contexts. ...
This article explores observations of care practices in interactions between early childhood educators and children in two urban early childhood settings in Ontario. Analysis of these care practices is informed by a feminist ethics of care. Findings show that the care actions of educators were more often instrumental in nature, often incomplete, and/ or interrupted. Children’s experience with and perspectives on their care were not taken into consideration. Structural factors such as staffing levels appeared to interfere significantly with the possibility of care as conceptualized from a feminist ethics of care framework. Practice and policy implications for the absence and presence of an ethics of care in Canadian early childhood settings are discussed.
... This theory was proposed and developed by Carol Gilligan 9,11 at Harvard University and was soon taken up by and other feminist theorists near the end of the 20th century. [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25] Originally, care theory was developed by Gilligan 9 to explain the discrepancy between men's and women's moral reasoning in studies using hypothetical moral dilemmas. ...
While the topic of caring coaching and its relationship to performance has been explored by researchers mainly in the UK, it has been neglected in the US with the exception of three studies by Fisher and colleagues. The core problem is a lack of understanding regarding the construct of care and whether coaches can care about athletes in pressure-filled, high-stakes, win-at-all-cost sport contexts. Thus, in this paper, we draw upon the ethic of care first proposed by Gilligan and later developed by Noddings and on results from the aforementioned studies by Fisher and colleagues as well as insights from scholarship in the UK to propose a heuristic of the potential relationship between caring coaching and elite athlete performance. Such a heuristic could be used in future coach development programs.
... This article follows from other work advocating the incorporation of the ethics of care into the public policy process: Hankivsky (2004), Kittay (1999), Robinson (2011), Sevenhuijsen (1998Sevenhuijsen ( , 2000Sevenhuijsen ( , and 2003, Tronto (2013), Tsuji (2011), andWilliams (2011), to name a few. 1 Such work has largely focused on particular issues such as welfare reform, family policy, or other specific areas of concern. Recently, Helena Olofsdotter Stensö ta has written more generally about what care ethics can offer public policy, though her work has not expressly examined the different stages of the policy process in finer detail or taken on real-world examples to demonstrate the practicability of care ethics for public policy (Stensö ta 2015, 198). ...
Policy documents are a source of authority in both a legal and a normative sense. When policy documents make particular assumptions about care work requiring private, not public, consideration, this can push care, its concerns, and those who give and receive care out of the public sphere. This marginalization of care work, however, is ethically suspect, and as such I argue here that we should use the feminist ethics of care as a way to analyze current policy and guide the creation of future policy to ensure more ethically robust policy statements. I advocate for the use of care ethics in addition to human rights ethically guided public policy, which prioritizes the effort to implement human rights standards through government action. My claim is that human rights should not be our sole basis for moral and political reasoning, especially in the policy process. Policy shapes our lives, and how we live in relation to particular others. Care ethics can and should be used as an ethical guide for the policy process because it can bring to the fore how institutional patterns of power shape our relations, an analysis that human rights theories are not, in general, built to undertake.
... It is also worth considering arguments made and repeated by feminists: When it comes to feminized labor, there is a consistent inability to fully acknowledge the productive value of it and to pay accordingly. Many efforts by second-wave feminists went into identifying and conceptualizing women's work as productive labor (Borchhorst & Siim, 2002;Dahl, 2010;Hernes, 1987;Holst, 2006;Kittay, 2001;Waring, 1988). In stark contrast to the notion of choice in the volunteering literature, a central argument in feminist writings on care is the existence of an ideology of altruism that compels women to provide their services without getting anything in return, a notion often referred to as "compulsory altruism" (Land & Rose, 1985). ...
This article aims to problematize the ways in which volunteering is presently conceptualized, theorized, and studied by positioning it as a form of unpaid labor. Over six focal points, the article highlights areas that deserve closer scrutiny: the question of when volunteering is work; the formal–informal and paid–unpaid distinctions of work; the notion of “choice,” especially volunteering as the lack of paid work choices; the assumption that volunteer work is similar to informal work; and a recognition that volunteering consists of many different forms of activities, not just one.
... Ela nos convida a pensar importantes questões como o cuidado com o aluno com deficiência, o princípio da interdependência como transversal a todas as relações e a ampliação da capacidade de agência dos estudantes no que se refere a todo o processo educativo. Kittay (2001) é uma autora estadunidense que tem contribuído para pensar o cuidado a pessoas com deficiência, apontando-o como uma questão de justiça social. Além disso, faz uma crítica a noção de independência como um ideal a ser alcançado nas sociedades modernas e destaca a dependência como um princípio inerente à condição humana, enfatizando o caráter relacional desta condição. ...
RESUMO No cenário de produções acadêmicas, sobre a acessibilidade no ensino superior, tem predominado pesquisas descritivas que mapeiam a realidade e discutem o impacto das políticas públicas atuais nesse contexto. O objetivo deste texto é fomentar o debate teórico em torno desse tema, visando subsidiar a reflexão conceitual sobre essa realidade, a partir das contribuições das teorias feministas da deficiência. Destacando os conceitos de cuidado e o princípio da interdependência, busca-se promover a ampliação da capacidade de agência dos estudantes em todo o processo educativo. Conclui-se este ensaio apontando para a importância da abordagem crítica da deficiência e do princípio dos direitos humanos como balizadores da inclusão dos estudantes com deficiência no ensino superior.
... Ela nos convida a pensar importantes questões como o cuidado com o aluno com deficiência, o princípio da interdependência como transversal a todas as relações e a ampliação da capacidade de agência dos estudantes no que se refere a todo o processo educativo. Kittay (2001) é uma autora estadunidense que tem contribuído para pensar o cuidado a pessoas com deficiência, apontando-o como uma questão de justiça social. Além disso, faz uma crítica a noção de independência como um ideal a ser alcançado nas sociedades modernas e destaca a dependência como um princípio inerente à condição humana, enfatizando o caráter relacional desta condição. ...
No cenário de produções acadêmicas, sobre a acessibilidade no ensino superior, tem predominado pesquisas descritivas que mapeiam a realidade e discutem o impacto das políticas públicas atuais nesse contexto. O objetivo deste texto é fomentar o debate teórico em torno desse tema, visando subsidiar a reflexão conceitual sobre essa realidade, a partir das contribuições das teorias feministas da deficiência. Destacando os conceitos de cuidado e o princípio da interdependência, busca-se promover a ampliação da capacidade de agência dos estudantes em todo o processo educativo. Conclui-se este ensaio apontando para a importância da abordagem crítica da de ciência e do princípio dos direitos humanos como balizadores da inclusão dos estudantes com deficiência no ensino superior.
... Thus, Kittay argues that informal carers' efforts should be reciprocated by society. 37 In addition, applying a rights discourse, West addresses their disadvantaged position by proposing a more substantial demand. She states that informal carers should have the right to care and to be supported in this activity. ...
In this paper, we explore young Polish Catholic mothers' moral reasoning on abortion. We draw on the concept of maternal knowledge and theoretical insights developed within the ethics of care to shed light on the complexities and contradictions experienced by Catholic mothers in the context of reproductive choices. The narratives we gathered through in‐depth interviews illustrate how mothers evoke embodied, experience‐based maternal knowledge to challenge hegemonic frameworks associated with legal, medical, and religious authoritative knowledges. We show how mothers engage critically with ideologized notions of sacrifice and suffering by placing these concepts in the context of relational maternal care work and argue that mothers adopt a position on the moral permissibility of abortion by reinterpreting religious norms and ideas, such as the protection of the family and vocation of care.
In this paper, we aim to establish a right to be cared as part of an interspecies and intersectional concept of justice. This approach recognizes vulnerability as an intrinsic characteristic of all living beings, regardless of gender, class, race, capacity, or species. Therefore, vulnerability is considered general, comprehensive, and fundamental to humans and other-than-humans, differently from modern ethical, political, and ontological theories that usually presuppose a paradigm of ‘invulnerability,’ albeit undeclared. The ideal of invulnerability does not represent the inner condition of living beings but sustains it as a foundation for systems of domination based on hierarchical value dualisms. Acknowledging the vulnerability related to interdependence without rejecting or misrepresenting it, is essential to overcoming these dualisms. Also, it demands recognizing that the distribution of care activities is limited and affects individuals differently depending on their social position, considering race, class, gender, capacity, and species. The right to be cared for due to the vulnerability aims to protect individuals and political minority groups from inequalities and injustices. Beyond negative rights, it requires protective measures imposing care duties on moral agents, social institutions, and the State for which we have proposed an universal interspecies guidelines. To be recognized as someone with moral and political value means having one’s vulnerability taken into account. Consequently, not being cared for in one’s vulnerability at the right time and to the proper extent, taking singularity and the contextual analysis into consideration so the particularities of the situation and specificities of the individual are adequately addressed, is to be the object of injustice. We conclude that a right to be cared for is part of a pluralistic concept of justice that encompasses an interspecies and intersectional perspective opposing the logic of domination and building the path of the logic of care.
Učebnica Občianstvo v kontexte etiky starostlivosti sa snaží predstaviť študentkám a študentom humanitných a spoločenskovedných odborov aktuálne otázky občianstva z perspektívy špecifickej morálno-filozofickej teórie, a to feministickej morálnej filozofie, konkrétne feministickej etiky starostlivosti. Tradične je totiž téma občianstva a otázky s ňou späté vnímaná a skúmaná ako téma politického myslenia a politickej teórie. O občianstve uvažujeme dominantne ako o politickej kategórii, ktorá má byť predmetom skúmania najmä politických vied, prípadne spoločenskovedných disciplín. Minulosť aj aktuálna súčasnosť nás vyzývajú premýšľať o občianstve v súvislosti s ľudskosťou a spolupatričnosťou, a teda z morálnej perspektívy. Chápať občianstvo len ako politickú kategóriu a politickú inštitúciu je nedostatočné. Konceptuálne oddelenie politiky od morálky a etiky má za dôsledok, že máme ťažkosti s pochopením občianstva ako morálne relevantnej kategórie a ako etickej hodnoty. To nám následne bráni dôsledne kriticky analyzovať predpoklady, ktoré stoja v základoch nášho chápania občianstva, a napokon, aj identifikovať príčiny a faktory, ktoré prispievajú k zlyhávaniu občianskej spoločnosti, nedostatkom a deficitom v uplatňovaní občianstva ako vízie postavenej na slobode, rovnosti a solidarite. Aby sme teda dokázali brať morálku a jej argumenty vážne, potrebujeme o oboch premýšľať kontextuálne ako o vzájomne prepojených oblastiach života. Uvedená učebnica sa snaží priniesť alternatívny pohľad na občianstvo, ktorý sa opiera o feministickú kritiku kľúčových kategórií a pojmov spojených s občianstvom, ako sú sloboda, autonómia, rovnosť, univerzálne práva, demokracia, spravodlivosť alebo solidarita. Súčasná feministická etika starostlivosti predstavuje jeden z inšpiratívnych spôsobov, ako otázky politiky, moci a morálky chápať ako vzájomne sa podmieňujúce a prepletené. Učebnica tak objasňuje hodnoty späté s demokratickým občianstvom, a zároveň potenciál feministickej etiky starostlivosti ako analytického, evaluačno-kritického a aplikačného nástroja pre porozumenie a skúmanie pojmu občianstva a praxe občianstva ako starostlivej praxe a praxe starostlivosti o dobrý život v občianskej spoločnosti.
Die Frage nach Legitimität und Akzeptanz des assistierten Suizids ist letztlich unbeantwortbar. Einfache dogmatische Positionen sind unangemessen. Die gegenwärtige Rechtsprechung – skeptische Neutralität bei Fragen nach dem Guten, Orientierung an der Freiheit der Einzelnen – ist in sich schlüssig und nachvollziehbar, damit auch die Aufhebung des Verbots. Und auf ganz individueller Ebene kann niemand sich ein Urteil anmaßen. Aber: Sind wir auch als Gesellschaft klug, praktisch weise genug, um den assistierten Suizid zu erlauben? Verfügen moderne Gesellschaftsmitglieder und die „mentale Infrastruktur“ der Gegenwartsgesellschaft über ausreichend Urteilskraft, um den assistierten Suizid erlauben zu können? Diese Frage kann man im Lichte des „Unbehagens an der Moderne“ nur mit Nein beantworten. Der assistierte Suizid mag formaljuristisch schlüssig und auf individueller Ebene verständlich und legitim sein, als Gesellschaft sind wir, bei Weitem, nicht klug genug und reif dafür. Die rechtliche Legitimierung und kulturelle Akzeptanz des assistierten Suizids tragen dazu bei, nicht nur wesentliche Fragen des Gesundheits- und Sozialsystems, sondern der Gesellschaft insgesamt zu überspringen und die spezifischen Gefährdungen moderner Gesellschaften zu verschärfen, anstatt sie auszubalancieren.
In this paper I attempt to reveal a woman’s intuition in understanding the value of labor (considered as satisfying one’s bodily needs). My central idea is that it has much to do with the notion of care and that care ethics contributes to the comprehension of the concept of labor and every work in general. The starting point is an overview oftwo different perspectives on labor: understanding work as care and care as work. The first approach is represented by Sibyl A. Schwarzenbach and her idea of “ethical reproduction” (or “reproductive labor”) which aims to fulfil one’s needs or to create relationships based on friendship. The second approach is that of Eva Feder Kittay who advocates the need and social and political convenience of considering care as work, with all its intrinsic characteristics. Both feminist philosophers go beyond the liberal notion of work as ownership relation (Locke) and the neoliberal productive assumption of work as a domain of power and productive capacity. Strongly convinced of the existence of profound social interdependency, Feder Kittay and Schwarzenbach emphasize the importance of dealing with human fragility in and through work and of fostering friendly relations. Our contemporary society is a “society of tiredness” and of burnout professionals (Byng-Chul) but still a precarious community (Standing), marked by the existence of those uncared for, whose present and future labor is uncertain. We need a balanced view on work, a voice combining common sense and humanistic vision. A woman’s voice, a different voice (Gilligan) can serve as a meaningful framework to create more true-to-life public policies regarding work and more adequate social patterns to approach this issue. Work understood as labor (Arendt) may consequently be rediscovered and given its proper value. My aim here is not to give a detailed explanation of the ideas mentioned above but rather to introduce into public debate the consideration of care as an inherent mark of each work.
The theoretical contribution of this chapter focuses on the multiple but reconcilable definitions of civic entitlements and responsibilities of all those social actors who represent a possible synthesis between private and public spheres, centre and periphery, inside and outside, developed and developing world, overcoming dichotomous ideas of inclusion/exclusion which typically define the concept of citizenship. More specifically, it looks at the ways in which critical theorisations of care, migration and emotions provide us with more grounded, phenomenological, intersectional understandings of citizenship which are able to overcome a merely binary logic of inclusion (via assimilation)/exclusion (via marginalisation). Its overall objective is developing new perspectives to understand the relationship between individuals, local communities and political institutions, and identifying useful insights into how people across the globe resourcefully “do citizenship” and social inclusion in many different ways and through the emotional dynamics revolving around them.KeywordsPhenomenological approachesCitizenshipInterdisciplinarityEmotionsInteractionsPositive marginalitiesEdge effect
This paper highlights the perspective of five doctoral students’ socialization in a feminist focused research group. Utilizing collaborative ethnography, this paper challenges the current conceptions of graduate student socialization that emphasizes neoliberal values such as individualism and competition that is normalized within doctoral education. In this collaborative effort we highlight the lessons we learned and provide a critique of the norms of the socialization and intellectual growth based on our interactions with each other and faculty members of the Feminist Research Collective. This paper showcases the unique experience of each doctoral student. Each author provides first-hand accounts of the transformative work of participating in a research group that is feminist centered and based in an epistemology of care. We acknowledge the tensions we experienced in confronting our own held beliefs about the research process grounded in our own social conditions that are informed by our diverse backgrounds.
Recognising dependency as a fundamental aspect of existence and activating Kittay’s reciprocity principle, ‘doulia’, we investigate the impacts of COVID-19 on student carers at an Australian university, to what extent teaching staff care for student carers and which pedagogies and teaching practices aid student carers. Analysing the experiences of social science students shortly after the lockdown in 2020, we find that pedagogies of kindness and flexibility support student carers. We call on teaching staff to recognise students’ inevitable dependencies and commit to pedagogies of kindness.
Care and the City is a cross-disciplinary collection of chapters examining urban social spaces, in which caring and uncaring practices intersect and shape people’s everyday lives. While asking how care and uncare are embedded in the urban condition, the book focuses on inequalities in caring relations and the ways they are acknowledged, reproduced, and overcome in various spaces, discourses, and practices. This book provides a pathway for urban scholars to start engaging with approaches to conceptualize care in the city through a critical-reflexive analysis of processes of urbanization. It pursues a systematic integration of empirical, methodological, theoretical, and ethical approaches to care in urban studies, while overcoming a crisis-centered reading of care and the related ambivalences in care debates, practices, and spaces. These strands are elaborated via a conceptual framework of care and situated within broader theoretical debates on cities, urbanization, and urban development with detailed case studies from Europe, the Americas, and Asia. By establishing links to various fields of knowledge, this book seeks to systematically introduce debates on care to the interconnecting fields of urban studies, planning theory, and related disciplines for the first time.
In this thesis I have analysed the theories of distributive justice from a feminist and relational egalitarian perspective. I have presented the main liberal theories of distributive justice, the numerous feminist critiques targeting them as well as the alternative proposals advanced by relational egalitarians. The thesis consists of six chapters which can be read as independent articles.
Die Ethik kommunaler Sorge verlangt einen Paradigmenwechsel des Zugangs, da im Gegensatz zur Ethik in Medizin und Pflege bzw. im Krankenhaus, im Pflegeheim und in der ambulanten Versorgung nicht die Institutionen den wesentlichen Hintergrund bilden, sondern die alltäglichen Lebens- und Beziehungszusammenhänge von Menschen. In den Vordergrund treten nicht pflege- oder medizinethische Fragen, die Versorger spielen eine relative Rolle, sondern umgekehrt stehen Alltag und Sorgebedürftigkeit, in die medizinische und pflegerische Aspekte hereinspielen, im Zentrum. Einem solchen alltagsnahen Netzwerkcharakter des ethischen Blicks und der konkreten ethischen Spannungsfelder muss Rechnung getragen werden. Was sind also die Grundlagen für eine kommunale Ethik? Wie können ethische Fragen in der Kommune angegangen werden? Es kristallisieren sich Konturen einer Ethik heraus, die im Paradigma einer präventiven und ressourcenorientierten Gesundheitsförderung bzw. eines Public Health Zugangs liegen. Ethische Fragen und Spannungsfelder existieren im offenen Feld des „dritten Sozialraums“, nicht „an sich“. Sie müssen aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven betrachtet werden. Eine „community“ ist ein fluides Beziehungsgewebe in unscharfen lebensweltlich „gefühlten“ Räumen. Entsprechend stellen sich Akteur*innen, die sich in der Entwicklung von kommunaler Sorge engagieren, ethische Fragen ihrerseits als komplexes „Gewebe“ von Spannungsfeldern dar. Einige Züge dieses Spannungs-Gewebes zu erhellen, ist Ziel dieses Beitrags, der schließlich Bearbeitungsmöglichkeiten des organisierten ethischen Gesprächs im kommunalen Setting vorstellt.
Schlüsselwörter: Care Ethik, Sorge-Ethik, Ethikberatung, Public Health, Sorgende Gemeinden, Sorgende Gemeinschaften, Soziales Kapital, Sorge-Beziehungen, Nachbarschaft, Gemeinschaft, Organisationsethik, Caring Communities.
We must reconceive the ethical relationship between mothers and their newborn babies. The intertwinement of mother and baby does not disappear with birth but rather persists in the form of postpartum maternal tethering. Drawing upon three years of ethnographic fieldwork and training in the United States and China, I argue that dependencies associated with postpartum maternal tethering make it extremely difficult for postpartum mothers to act autonomously, even in the relational sense. Breaching this tether opens up new possibilities for thinking about the bioethics of vulnerability, dependency, and care by denaturalizing and desanctifying the mother-baby relationship and diversifying newborn care.
Public Health Zugänge spielen in der Förderung kommunaler Sorgekultur (z. B. Caring Communities) eine bedeutsame Rolle. Public Health ist dabei in ihren ethischen und existentiellen Dimensionen gefordert, Menschen an der Gestaltung ihrer Lebens- und Gesundheitsbedingungen durch einen offenen Prozess des Nachdenkens und des Gesprächs darüber, was ein gutes Leben und Sterben ausmachen, zu beteiligen. In diesem mäeutischen Lernprozess können Formen von sokratischen Gesprächen als Care-Dialoge unterstützend sein. Diese ermöglichen in einem tieferen Sinn aneinander Anteil nehmen zu können (Compassion & Care) und die kommunale Sorge als „Gewebe“ von Sorge-Beziehungen im dritten Sozialraum – zwischen den formellen Organisationen und der Familie – zu gestalten. Kommunale Sorgekultur setzt dabei einen doppelten Paradigmenwechsel voraus: 1) Sorge nicht von den Organisationen der Versorgung her zu denken, sondern von den alltäglichen Lebens- und Beziehungszusammenhängen der Bürger*innen, und 2) eine Ethik kommunaler Sorge, eine Alltagsethik, zu prozessieren. Public Health als kommunale Sorgekultur unterstützt die Förderung gesellschaftlicher Rahmenbedingungen, die „gute Sorge“ lebbar machen.
Difficulties experienced in obtaining energy services have been represented as unjust because of how they can prevent people from realising primary human capabilities. Capabilities are relational, being embedded within complex interdependencies between people and socio-material systems. These complexities can cause problems for approaches to energy justice that are based on concepts of welfare rights. We argue that the ethics of care, with its emphasis on relationality as the ground of obligation, and particularly on how social relationships are bound up with power and responsibility, can provide firmer foundations for thinking about energy injustice. Care ethicists distinguish between different forms of dependency, some necessary, others oppressive. Using qualitative longitudinal methods to explore people’s experiences of energy challenges and energy vulnerability can show how power and responsibility within dependency relationships can change over time. With data from a longitudinal study in South Wales, we explore how everyday energy-using practices can become entangled with harmful forms of dependency. We show how the everyday ethical evaluation of these relationship undertaken by participants harmonises with the ethics of care. Our data show the utility of understanding relationships of dependence within the energy system in terms of responsibility and irresponsibility, in order to better understand energy injustice.
Is Edward Abramowski an ethicist of care? Part I. Introduction to the ethics of care and the ethics of friendship These two papers contribute to the research tendency that seeks an analogy between the ethics of care and other ethical theories. The purpose of this study is to compare the ethics of care with Edward Abramowski’s moral theory. The critical appraisal of both theories requires the reconstruction and confrontation of issues such as friendship-brotherhood-care, response to the needs of others, and making friendship-brotherhood-care public. The analysis of philosophical sources was carried out with the use of tools from hermeneutics and the history of ideas. In the case of the ethics of care, both the theories of direct caring relations and of group, institutional caring relations were examined. The analysis of Abramowski’s philosophy is focused on the ethics of friendship. In Part I, the ethics of care and the ethics of friendship are presented. Part II refers the results obtained from the analysis of the ethics of friendship to the theses and arguments which feature in the ethics of care. Czy Edward Abramowski jest etykiem troski? Część I. Prezentacja etyki troski i etyki przyjaźni Seria dwóch artykułów wpisuje się w tendencję badawczą poszukującą analogii pomiędzy etyką troski a innymi teoriami etycznymi. Celem pracy jest porównanie etyki troski i teorii moralnej Edwarda Abramowskiego. Krytyczne badanie obu teorii polega na odtworzeniu i konfrontacji rozumienia takich zagadnień, jak: przyjaźń – braterstwo – troska, źródła reakcji na potrzeby innego, upublicznienie przyjaźni – braterstwa – troski. Do jego realizacji wykorzystano analizę tekstów filozoficznych przeprowadzoną z uwzględnieniem narzędzi hermeneutyki i historii idei. W przypadku etyki troski badaniu poddano zarówno teorie bezpośrednich relacji opiekuńczych, jak i teorie relacji pośrednich, międzygrupowych, zinstytucjonalizowanych. Przedmiotem analizy w filozofii Abramowskiego stała się etyka przyjaźni. W pierwszym artykule zaprezentowano etykę troski oraz etykę przyjaźni. W drugim odniesiono pozyskane wyniki analiz etyki przyjaźni do tez i argumentacji obecnych w etyce troski.
The purpose of this paper is to analyze the emergence of the doula profession in Italy. Doulas represent a new occupational group that offers emotional and practical support to pregnant women and new mothers. Moving from ecological and bourdesian approachs the contribution aims at showing how doulas are trying to affirm their jurisdiction and define their occupational field struggling with the occupational field of midwives. The paper illustrates also why the doula profession can be defined a social-relational care profession.
This article explores the relationship between ‘care’ and ‘community’ in the context of a residential community established to offer hospitality and support to people with addictions, mental health problems and other troubles. The community is located in a rural part of England and was established as a Christian community offering hospitality to people of all faiths or none. The source of data is oral history interviews conducted at the time of the community’s 60th anniversary. Feminist care ethics is used to offer an analysis of what constitutes care in this setting, as well as to explore insights into caregiver/care receiver relationships and the specific nature of responsibility in this context. The significance of both place and the non-human elements of the community (animals, cultivated land) are considered, as well as the importance of time in relation to daily and seasonal rhythms of community life. The article suggests that care for the community is necessary to sustain care for members of the community and that this offers a valuable different perspective from an emphasis on individualised care.
The feminist philosophy of “ethics of care” has been important for disability studies inasmuch as it helps us see caregiving as widespread and admirable, rather than as a failure of autonomy. Care ethicists usually imagine care as either an institutional situation or an intimate dyad. However, in “Critical Care,” I add a third case in a midrange scale: the care community. The care community is a voluntary social formation, composed of friends, family, and neighbors, that coalesces around someone in need. It is my contention that by exploring the care community, we can make important aspects of care visible and rethink care relationships. What we see in care communities is a process, rather than a preset care structure, and that fluidity allows us to interrogate the conditions under which care can develop and the dynamics of extended care. I use Victorian fiction to showcase care communities, since novels of this period are marked by ubiquitous spontaneous small groups forming around people who are ill or hurt, but I also make a case that care communities continue to exist today, particularly among queer communities and people of color, performing a vital function in our ordinary lives. Finally, I argue that care communities can help us fundamentally rethink disability as a need like any other need rather than an inherent identity. Eva Feder Kittay has argued that care relations are the foundation of civic society; in that case, disability and the care community that arises in response to it are not marginalized cases but are what, profoundly, makes social life possible.
In this paper, I explore new perspectives that an ethics of care approach brings to our understanding of, and responses to, poverty and development. Building on the works of care-ethics scholars such as Virginia Held and Fiona Robinson, I argue that an ethics of care approach provides a unique theory-practice nexus that offers alternative concrete ways to tackle human poverty that lends itself to both local and cross-border applications. In addition to providing crucial insights into women’s struggles in varied contexts, such an approach also uses the lens of care to re-envision human securities and vulnerabilities, thereby deserving of greater attention by scholars, practitioners, and institutions in search of effective ethical models of global development. I provide a case-study of Karma Kutir, a women’s development organization based in the city of Kolkata, India, to shed light on context-specific care-centered development practices aimed at alleviating poverty. I show how such practices are highly effective and provide concrete evidence of the value of an ethics of care approach to poverty and women’s development.
As a response to demographic ageing, various governments have been promoting social policies that promote older people's participation in productive activities, including those outside the formal labour market. Nevertheless, older people's behaviours do not simply reflect government policies and intentions. This paper explores how older people themselves interpret their social roles within a policy context that seeks to position them as providers of welfare through their participation in community activities. For this purpose, this paper draws on a qualitative case study of older people in Japan engaging in health promotion and mutual aid among local residents. By employing Hannah Arendt's distinction between the human activities of labour, work and action as a conceptual framework, it finds that although the purported purpose of community activities was to substitute decreasing pensions and family care or to create a better community, participants in this study valued their activities as a process of creating new relations and new realities through action. The paper argues that while labour has occupied a predominant position in the post-war welfare paradigm, community activities by an expanding population of older people may offer opportunities for action, which were not always available through paid work or care-giving in the household.
Vulnerability has emerged as a fruitful concept in recent political discourse. Although care theorists have sometimes framed care ethics in terms of vulnerability, they have most often oriented it around dependency. This article discusses the differences between dependency and vulnerability and argues for a reconceptualization of care ethics in terms of vulnerability. By reframing care ethics around vulnerability, care theorists can not only broaden the scope of issues that care ethics can address and clarify ambiguities in the theory but also strengthen the justification for a responsibility to care.
This thesis investigates Turkish migrants’ aging experiences and their understandings about care by concentrating on the accounts of a group of first-generation Turkish immigrants who settled in Sweden in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The aim is to explore how older immigrants’ lives have been marked by the experience of migration and re-establishment in another country, how the impact of having once lost caring relations affected their decisions and desires about care in old age. This study examines some common patterns about aging in a host country, ideals of care in old age, encounters with medical institutions, interpretations of formal care facilities, and identity and community construction processes. Rather than generalizing and categorizing cultural, ethnic, or even religious expectations in the case of elderly care, it seeks to grasp the complexity of the migrants’ ideals of care and caring relations by focusing on the positions they take in diaspora space. This study is based on ethnographic research which extended over two years (2011–2013). The empirical material consisted of observations and semi-structured in-depth interviews with 20 older Turkish people, 10 women and 10 men, who live in Sweden.
By focusing on medical care stories, the study highlights the importance of looking at previous experiences of being cared about and cared for in the deliberation of future care needs and expectations. By elucidating how older Turkish people understand formal care facilities such as home-help services and elderly care homes, the study underlines ambivalent attitudes towards these options. This ambivalence is anchored in ways of perceiving “the Swedish” as modern but uncaring as well as in their understandings of family members as caring others. The study also shows how the Turkish family is imagined and done through three emotions: merhamet (compassion/pity), vefa (loyalty/ faithfulness), and şefkat (concern/affection). Emotionalization of the family is not about reinforcing, but, rather, about negotiating the filial duty towards older parents. Of note is also that these emotions circulate inside and outside the family and that a caring diasporic community is imagined.
By exploring older Turkish migrants’ experiences and understandings, this study contributes to the growing research field of care for people with a migration background. It critically assesses older Turkish immigrants’ aging experiences, and their understandings about care options, not through cultural differences that are supposed to be unchanging and homogeneous, but based on the positions that they take in diaspora space. This study contributes by showing that, in order to understand the possible expectations of older migrants when it comes to decisions about and needs for care, it is crucial to consider their experience of having lived and aged in diaspora space. Designing, deliberating on, and deconstructing particular ideals of care become possible only if we take these experiential, mnemonic, and relational meaning-making processes into account.
Key words: Care, aging, diaspora, Turkish migration, emotions, family
A critical introduction to the major traditions of feminist theory, now with new considerations of existential feminism and a conclusion reflecting on the future of feminist theory.
A new welfarestate has been a popular topic in welfare scholarship.
The social demand for anew welfare state has arisen since the current
welfare state cannot adequately address new social risks such as ageing,
low fertility, care crisis, and low employment. What would a new welfare
state look like then? More fundamentally, what a better welfare state
should look like? This paper suggests a caring state as an answer to these
questions. A caring state is one governed by care ethics as normative
principles. The purpose of this paper is to introduce care ethics and
characterize a caring state as a normative goal for reaching a new welfare
state. These care ethics proposed in this study will contribute to
contemporary discourse of a new welfare state in the academia and
society of Korea.
Contemporary industrialized societies have been confronted with the fact and consequences of women's increased participation in paid employment. Whether this increase has resulted from women's desire for equality or from changing economic circumstances, women and men have been faced with a crisis in the organization of work that concerns dependents, that is, those unable to care for themselves. This is labor that has been largely unpaid, often unrecognized, and yet is indispensable to human society.
This article describes a 20-year program of research on the Nurse Home Visitation Program, a model in which nurses visit mothers beginning during pregnancy and continuing through their children's second birthdays to improve pregnancy outcomes, to promote children's health and development, and to strengthen families' economic self-sufficiency. The results of two randomized trials (one in Elmira, New York, and the second in Memphis, Tennessee) are summarized, and an ongoing trial in Denver, Colorado, is briefly described. Results of the Elmira and Memphis trials suggest the following: The program benefits the neediest families (low-income unmarried women) but provides little benefit for the broader population. Among low-income unmarried women, the program helps reduce rates of childhood injuries and ingestions that may be associated with child abuse and neglect, and helps mothers defer subsequent pregnancies and move into the workforce. Long-term follow-up of families in Elmira indicates that nurse-visited mothers were less likely to abuse or neglect their children or to have rapid successive pregnancies. Having fewer children enabled women to find work, become economically self-sufficient, and eventually avoid substance abuse and criminal behavior. Their children benefitted too. By the time the children were 15 years of age, they had had fewer arrests and convictions, smoked and drank less, and had had fewer sexual partners. The program produced few effects on children's development or on birth outcomes, except for children born to women who smoked cigarettes when they registered during pregnancy. The positive effects of the program on child abuse and injuries to children were most pronounced among mothers who, at registration, had the lowest psychological resources (defined as high levels of mental health symptoms, limited intellectual functioning, and little belief in their control of their lives). Generally, effects in Elmira were of greater magnitude and covered a broader range of outcomes than in Memphis, perhaps because of differences between the populations studied, community contexts, or a higher rate of turnover among home visitors in Memphis than in Elmira. The article concludes that the use of nurses as home visitors is key; that services should be targeted to the neediest populations, rather than being offered on a universal basis; that clinically tested methods of changing health and behavioral risks should be incorporated into program protocols; and that services must be implemented with fidelity to the model tested if program benefits found in scientifically controlled studies are to be reproduced as the program is replicated in new communities.
The family in contemporary America may be defined as a group of individuals who by birth, adoption, marriage, or declared commitment share deep personal connections and are mutually entitled to receive, and obligated to provide, support of various kinds. As more people live in nontraditional arrangements, the gap between their needs and interests and official designations of family widens; AIDS has accelerated this change, affecting legal definitions, medical decisions, and questions of housing and child custody. While existing families adjust to the exigencies of AIDS, changing laws and customs may also affect the formation of new families. The epidemic threatens the intimacy and acceptance that ideally bind family ties, while at the same time reinforcing their necessity.