Ethics Of Care Research Articles

“We Are All Animals”: Multispecies Entanglements and More-than-Human Politics in Romesh Gunesekera’s Heaven’s Edge and Suncatcher

Despite differences in genre, Romesh Gunesekera’s novels, Heaven’s Edge (2002) and Suncatcher (2019) both contain a narrative pattern that draws attention to multispecies entanglements by prominently featuring them in the climactic moments of the novels. Drawing on theories of multispecies entanglement, care, and politics as interspecies practices, I argue that the novels present the nation as a more-than-human configuration and reveal the possibilities and limitations of developing practices and ethics of care and resistance that can lead to a more-than-human politics, i.e., a politics that envisions creating conditions of socio-ecological flourishing for all.

Coercive control: Health, victims' rights and the ethics of care

This article provides healthcare professionals with an overview of research on coercive control, a paramount concept for understanding domestic violence, primarily targeting women and children. It aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogue and integrate advances into professional practices and (psycho)education. To this end, we present the conceptual evolution of coercive control and the perpetrators' behavioral patterns, their risks for victims and professionals, their devastating impact on the rights and biopsychosocial health of adult and child victims, and the challenges posed by technology, particularly generative artificial intelligence.

Ethical Approaches to the Practice of Anesthesiology - Part 1: Overview of Ethics in Clinical Care: History and Evolution

Ethical Approaches to the Practice of Anesthesiology - Part 1: Overview of Ethics in Clinical Care: History and Evolution

Situating Ubuntu Philosophy in Pre-service Teacher Education

Ubuntu African philosophy and its values have been a subject of discussion by stakeholders due to its humanness and communal nature. It embodies African cultural values and belief systems that form the ways of life of indigenous people. These critical attributes of Ubuntu have necessitated its integration into pre-service teacher education to prepare Ubuntu-focused teachers who can contribute to decolonizing the education system in South Africa and beyond. However, efforts must be made to integrate Ubuntu values into pre-service teacher education. This paper reports on an investigation of the relevance of Ubuntu’s philosophy to pre-service teacher education. The investigation adopted the qualitative integrative literature review approach by selecting twenty-four articles from Scopus, EBSCO, and Google Scholar databases for review. The authors selected relevant articles using the relevant inclusion criteria and analyzed them under different themes to answer the two research questions formulated for this study. In order to increase teachers’ capacity to support the decolonization of education in Africa, the article suggests that the humanness and communalism approaches to education should be incorporated into pre-service teacher education curricula. That the quest for colonial knowledge over the years in South Africa and, indeed, Africa has been attributed to the Eurocentric and increased domination of African culture of togetherness and ethics of care. The paper also concludes that Ubuntu higher education can serve as a framework for decolonizing the African higher education system. The authors suggest that there is a need to formulate strategies for integrating important values of Ubuntu, like humanness, interconnectedness, and communalism, into the pre-service teacher education program.

Putting ethics of care into public relations: Toward a multi-level agency model

This paper examines how ethics of care (also known as care ethics) can be applied to public relations, drawing insights from a two-stage empirical study. The first stage explores industry best practices from award-winning campaigns, followed by elite interviews with leading practitioners to understand how care ethics can be infused into various organisational, personal, and professional contexts. The paper examines contested connections between care ethics and Aristotelian virtue ethics, building on early work by Virginia Held and others, to develop a multi-level agency model of enacting care ethics. This fuses an array of concepts: caring-about, caring-for, self-care, habitus, and the lateral integration of care as a form of ‘caring citizenship’. In turn, this fusion advances ethics of care as a shared practice between caregivers and care-receivers, shifting its focus from essentially within the private to the public sphere, locating public relations in this process.

Addressing more-than-human care through Yorùbá environmental ethics

This article presents more-than-human care ethics from a Yorùbá (African) perspective with a focus on water in Yorùbá belief. The view I develop in this article to show beyond human care, how nature cares for itself is encapsulated in the notion of ‘mutual courteousness’. The article demonstrates that this mutual courteousness approach engrained in Yorùbá ontology, epistemology, and axiology possesses a sound possibility for enabling the overhauling of our understanding of conservation towards seeing it as a more-than-human process. This shared ethics is fundamental because it helps us think about conservation, action, and virtues in a reciprocal spectrum beyond human caring. The paper argues that water conservation debates surrounding non-native ownership and management in Nigeria should not only be human or economically motivated but should present a holistic and sustainable approach to environmental interactions. Employing the method of philosophical analysis, this article explores the environmental ethics rooted in the Yorùbá culture of Southwestern Nigeria.

Activist work is care work: conceptualising resistance in Indonesia and the Philippines through feminist ethics

This article draws on interview data collected in 2021 from Indonesia and the Philippines to argue that activist work should fundamentally be understood as care work. The first part of the article advocates for a novel inductive theorisation of intersectional care ethics in social movement studies and activist-centred research. The second part of the article utilises this conceptual framework to discuss the paramount role of women in grassroots activist spaces both on the frontlines and behind the scenes. The stories of resistance by women activists, which comprise the core of this article, help to illustrate how the patriarchy and other structures of power may simultaneously be subverted and reproduced in grassroots community spaces.

Understanding the caring professional dispositions of the early childhood education teacher assistants in Chile

Despite their crucial global importance in the daily work within classrooms, teacher assistants are barely addressed in early childhood education (ECE) teaching policy and research. In this context, little is known about features of their role – more commonly studied in the case of lead teachers – such as their professional dispositions. This paper analyses the discourses of a group of Chilean ECE teacher assistants about their dispositions, exploring possible intersections and dissonances of an ethics of care and mainstream technical practice approaches in ECE. Sixteen assistants from two ECE centres located in an urban suburb of Santiago de Chile took part in focus groups and interviews, and their discourses were analysed through a Reflexive Thematic Analysis. Findings show that teacher assistants address their role by producing a discourse informed by an ethics of care, but also drawing marginally on a mainstream technical perspective. The findings may help inform future ECE teaching policy in Chile, embracing new approaches to ECE professionalism that foreground caring practices and acknowledge the diversity of the workforce.

“We’re Not Lab Rats”: Analysis of Netizens’ Response to BCG Vaccine-Test Proposal Against COVID-19 in Africa

In April 2020, two French scientists proposed Africa as the site for testing a BCG tuberculosis vaccine for treating COVID-19. This sparked social media outrage with some describing the gaffe as a hangover of colonial mentality. This study examined netizens’ interpretation of the faux pas and how the social media activism that followed it shaped the narrative about Africa’s identity. The study found that netizens interpreted the discourse as racism against Africa, colonialism, and a breach of medical ethics. These created an avenue for social media activism by a new generation of African netizens to assert their independence, protect their humanity, and promote the idea of Africa for Africans. The study recommends the need for ethics of care and racial sensitivity in public and global health discourses that have the potential to reopen scars of historical trauma in subjugated populations who may be geographically or socially affected by pandemics.

(Care)fully reconstituting cruel professionalism with and for early childhood educators: how caring activism can resist uncaring conditions

ABSTRACT As a patriarchal and neoliberal construct, professionalism actively contorts the embodied care work of this femme profession into a predetermined frame, fragmenting, constricting, and harming educators’ identities. In this paper, we briefly outline the ongoing project of professionalism both in the ECEC sector broadly and in the unique context of Ontario, Canada. Taking up Lauren Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism, we assert that professionalism in ECEC is cruel. We situate our example of cruel professionalism within the Ontario, Canada context and take up the Association of Early Childhood Educators Ontario’s (AECEO) grassroots community-building work grounded in feminist ethics of care and the idea of caring activism to subvert this cruelty. We do this by centering the voices and lived experiences of ECEs working in a marginalized corner of the ECEC sector who are also active members of a grassroots advocacy community of practice (CoP) associated with the AECEO. Through their narratives the cruelty of professionalism is exposed, and the collective improvisation of caring activism amongst ECEs is revealed. We conclude by offering a caring optimism as a proposition and an open question for redefining and reconstituting what it means to be a professional ECE.

Ethical dilemmas of translanguaging pedagogy in L2 and basic literacy education for adults: social justice and ethics of care

ABSTRACT This paper explores the ethical challenges and possibilities of conducting responsible and transformative translanguaging pedagogy in adult education for second language learners with limited previous experience of schooling. We identify and explore ethical dilemmas in teachers’ interaction and multilingual teaching practices. The data was produced in a linguistic ethnography and action research project. It consists of classroom observations and interviews with teachers who teach in the programme Swedish for Immigrants (SFI). The teachers express and embody ambivalence in relation to the students’ use of their whole linguistic repertoires and the students are not always treated as competent to make informed decisions about their own use of linguistic repertoires. This touches on issues of citizenship and democracy and here the framework ethics of care offers context-specific ways of understanding and responding to the ethical challenges of multilingual teaching.

SCRUTINIZING KEY ELEMENTS OF GREEN LITERATURE ON THE CHILDREN’S BOOK TATA KATA: KUMPULAN CERITA ANAK COMPOSED BY YOUNG WRITERS OF THE TIN ISLAND

Bangka is well-known as the Tin Island. Tin mining in Bangka, both on land and at sea, actually causes environmental damage. This has been a serious issue for a long time, impacting Bangkanese lives from children to adults, in addition to air pollution. That is why the purpose of highlighting the topic is to explore the elements of green literature organized in the children's book Tata Kata: Kumpulan Cerita Anak, written by several young Bangka writers. Published in 2020, it consists of ten short stories for children at age 10–12, and one of the provided themes is environment. Interestingly, the concept of ecocriticism is present within the object itself. The study employed a descriptive-qualitative method to formulate the answers to the problem. The data were obtained through observation and in-depth interviews with the authors. The data analysis technique from Miles and Huberman (2014) played a vital role to process the data set in order to acquire profound information. The findings classified the key elements of green literature in the children's book Tata Kata: Kumpulan Cerita Anak into three categories: (a) environmental citizenship, (b) care ethics, and (c) ecoliteracy. The authors fully support the existence of these elements, as they aim to raise awareness and persuade Bangkanese children to protect and care for the environment in light of the massive emerging damage. Furthermore, the young writers implicitly criticized the nature of Bangka, which is currently endangered. It means that Bangkanese children are expected to be environmental heroes/heroines in the next few years.

Patient autonomy in an East-Asian cultural milieu: a critique of the individualism-collectivism model

The practice of medicine—and especially the patient-doctor relationship—has seen exceptional shifts in ethical standards of care over the past few years, which by and large originate in occidental countries and...

Feeling, thinking, acting

Abstract This article considers the multi- and intersemiotic expression of empathy and compassion in a campaign organised by the Vegan Society. It draws upon insights from ecofeminism and the ethics of care as well as systemic functional semiotics as a way of exploring how instances of attitude (affect, judgment and appreciation) in the campaign’s various texts might be negotiated and shared, creating potentials for empathetic and compassionate responses. The study finds that parts of the campaign represent empathy and compassion as exemplars for readers to follow, while other parts of the campaign, especially social media, provide readers with an opportunity to enact empathy and compassion. The study also identifies gendered and generational dimensions, and suggests that syndromes or clusters of positive and negative attitude can form the basis for empathetic and compassionate responses.

Bringing Animals in-to Wildlife Tourism

The objective of this paper is to highlight animal stakeholders, evidenced-based best practices, care ethics, and compassion as essential components of sustainable wildlife tourism. These tenets stem from an animal geography lens, which is well-positioned for studies of animal-based tourism and transspecies caregiving. As a conceptual contribution, this paper presents a theory synthesis that ‘stays with the trouble’ of wildlife tourism and identifies ways to ‘bring animals in’. Our approach could be described as multispecies, critical, and socio-ecological. We argue that the trouble with wildlife tourism writ large includes nonhuman suffering and biodiversity loss, unethical and unevidenced practices, gaps in the knowledge of wildlife welfare, and limited engagement with animals as stakeholders. We then present four ways to ‘bring animals in’ as co-participants in wildlife tourism research and practice. This involves enfranchising animals as stakeholders in wildlife tourism, buttressed by ethics of care, best practices, and a commitment to improved outcomes along the conservation-welfare nexus. Finally, we consider the extent to which wildlife sanctuary tourism serves as a further problem or panacea that balances the conservation and welfare of wild animals. The result of our theory synthesis is the promotion of a more care-full and compassionate paradigm for wildlife tourism, which draws from diverse scholarships that contribute, conceptually and practically, to the underserved niches of wildlife welfare, rehabilitation, and sanctuary research.

Dreaming big with little therapy devices: automated therapy from India

This paper examines the aspirations, imaginaries and utopias of designers of an AI-based mental health app in India. By looking at automated therapy as both technological fix and sociotechnical object, I ask, What can we learn from engaging with psy technologists’ imaginaries and practices of health care futures? What are the assumptions they encode in the app? How does automated therapy reconfigure the geographies and temporalities of care? While automated therapy as instantiated by Wysa provides, I argue, a modest mental health intervention, the scalar aspirations of designers are anything but small. The paper proceeds in three steps. First, it turns to designers’ imaginaries of what it means to care for current mental health needs in digitally saturated lifeworlds and how they inscribe them into the app. It identifies nonjudgmental listening, anonymity, acceptance, reframing, and agency as key ideas encoded in Wysa’s sociotechnical algorithms, along with a congruence between entrepreneurial and encoded ethics of care. Second, it situates automated therapy within anthropological scholarship on ‘little’ technical devices in global health to argue that automated therapy devices such as Wysa articulate dreams for minimalist interventions with macro effects. Finally, it explores the new geographies and temporalities of care that automated therapy spurs, tracing the ways the app bridges various spatial and temporal gaps and obstacles of human therapy and upends common global health pathways. This paper contributes to recent scholarship on aspirations, dreams and utopias and on digitization and datafication in global health.

Enhancing doctoral training with reflexive practices: Insights from a collaborative autoethnography

ABSTRACT As calls increase to give public affairs doctoral students more agency in their learning, we report on the effects of implementing professional development, self-reflection, and original research into a first-year, first-semester introductory doctoral seminar. Using Scott et al’s framework, we purposively integrated elements of socialization and self-reflection into the course materials and assignments. Via collaborative autoethnography, we argue that reflexivity and deliberation in real-time yields: personal connection to the materials and each other; kinetic energy and information retention; the blending of academic rigor with an ethic of care. The conclusion offers a framework based on our findings to assist other professors in developing courses with built-in reflection and professional development to work toward equity in the classroom.

Navigating the Impact of the Dobbs Decision: Perspectives from Pediatric Surgeons on Reproductive Healthcare.

Nationwide abortion restrictions resulting from the Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022) decision have generated confusion and uncertainty among healthcare professionals, with concerns for liability impacting clinical decision-making and outcomes. The impact on pediatric surgery can be seen in prenatal counseling for fetal anomaly cases, counseling for fetal intervention, and recommendations for pregnant children and adolescents who seek termination. It is essential that all physicians and healthcare team members understand the legal implications on their clinical practices, engage with resources and organizations that can help navigate these circumstances, and consider advocating for patients and themselves. Pediatric surgeons must consider the impact of these changing laws on their ability to provide comprehensive and ethical care and counseling to all patients.

Beading relations: Reimagining, remapping, and remembering through The Lake Nipissing Beading Project

ABSTRACT As members of the Lake Nipissing Beading Project Collective, we reflect on a community-beaded map project that evolved from a partnership between Nipissing University, Nipissing First Nation, and Dokis First Nation, rooted in the traditional lands of the Nbisiing Nishnaabeg on Robinson Huron Treaty (1850) territory. The Lake Nipissing Beading Project (LNBP) emerged in 2020 as a gesture of community care in response to the socio-spatial challenges of the global COVID-19 pandemic. The traveling beaded map installation reimagines, remaps, and remembers Lake Nipissing and surrounding watersheds through a collaborative process rooted in relationality and reciprocity. Critically situating and subsequently “taking back” provincial geospatial imagery, the project presents one attempt to decolonize geographical tools through creative intervention that combines storytelling practices of beading and countermapping. We reflect on the multi-layered histories enlivened through project activities, including those of our community-academic partnerships. We discuss what it means to recognize the beaded map as a living relation and carrier of living stories, re-orienting spatial knowledges toward an intentional ethics of care and community-led stewardship. In doing so the project re-centers Nbisiing Nishnaabeg relationships to, with, and through the lake.

Sustaining tenancies by ‘caring-with’: care ethics in social housing tenancy management

ABSTRACT This article contributes to scholarship that conceptualises housing, particularly social housing, as an infrastructure of care. Care for people with housing needs that cannot be met in the private market is shaped through the provision of social housing, and social housing can also be a site for caring (and careless) practices and relations. Using qualitative data gathered in interviews with tenancy managers at one of the largest social housing providers in Victoria, I argue that tenancy management must be understood as an integral pillar of the caring infrastructure social housing can provide. Tenancy managers who participated in this study understood tenancy management in social housing as a caring practice. They described their role as oriented around sustaining the tenancies of people with high and complex support needs who would otherwise be at high risk of homelessness. However, tenancy managers also faced consistent barriers to the enactment of tenancy-sustainment-as-care, which emerged when caring relationships between the actors involved in sustaining a tenancy broke down. This paper focuses on their experiences of overcoming barriers, resolving conflicts, and successfully sustaining tenancies. The analysis shows that ‘caring-with’ – i.e., working relationally to build collaborative networks of care-givers and care-receivers – can support tenancy sustainment.