Feminist Ethics Research Articles

Beyond Derrida: Fragments of feminist hospitality in residents hosting illegalized migrants in Belgium

In the context of migration, hospitality is often analysed as a vertical power relation, in which hosts impose conditions and demands upon their guests. While acknowledging the drastically unequal structural power relations in which hospitality takes place, this article explores how these power relations can be mitigated and developed towards more reciprocal relationalities. To do so, it focuses on a specific form of hospitality: urban residents providing shelter to migrants who are illegalized by the state. Drawing on in-depth interviews with residents affiliated with the Brussels-based Citizens Platform for Support of Refugees, I argue that their discourses and practices of hospitality – while being limited and imperfect – constitute alternative spaces of inclusion and affirmation, circumventing the Belgian State’s exclusionary stance. Combining Derridian hospitality framework with the feminist ethics of care lens, the article casts inquiry into the complexity and ambivalence of hospitality practices, seeing them not only as sites of power struggle but also as potential microcosms of social transformation. First of all, it illustrates how the feminist lens allows us to see hospitality acts as subjective practices, enabling a positive relationality towards the other. Secondly, it deliberates the potential for reciprocal exchange and resident hosts’ strategies to resist the verticality of hospitality relationships. Finally, it challenges the notion of regarding such practices as naïve by showcasing these practices’ political dimension.

Žižek’s Hegel, Feminist Theory, and Care Ethics

This article presents conceptual bridges that exist between the philosophy of G.W.F Hegel and a feminist ethics of care. To do so, it engages with Slavoj Žižek’s contemporary reading of Hegel in concert with existing feminist interpretations of Hegel’s thought. The goal of doing so is to demonstrate how both Žižek and a selection of critical feminist thinkers interpret Hegel’s perspective on the nature of subjectivity, intersubjective relations and the relationship between the subject and the world it inhabits, in a way that can further our thinking on the feminist ethics of care as a relational and contextualist ethics that foregrounds vulnerability as a condition of existence. These readings of Hegel highlight the radical contingency of human subjectivity, as well as the relationship between human subjectivity and the external world, in a way that is compatible with the feminist ethics of care’s emphasis on the particularity, fluidity, and interdependency of human relationships. I argue that this confrontation between care ethics and mainstream philosophy is valuable because it offers mutual contributions to both care ethics as a moral and political theory and the philosophy of Hegel and Žižek.

Inclusive Approaches by VAW Shelters: Respecting Women's Choice to be Together With Companion Animals

Women often delay moving to VAW shelters if their companion animals’ safety is not ensured. Yet, few shelters accommodate them together. The purpose of this study is to explore what may help to promote services for women with companion animals facing violence, through learning from professionals who already provide support. Our email survey with VAW shelters in Ontario, Canada identified services and potential interviewees. Nine semi-structured telephone interviews with professionals were conducted to explore their experiences and views on human–animal relationships. All agencies that provided onsite programs, plus one about to start, participated. We utilized Critical Animal Studies as a theory to understand human–animal relationships through concepts such as intersectionality, anthropocentrism, speciesism, and feminist ethics of responsibility. The study found: (1) seven approaches shelters used to help women with companion animals; (2) programs that accept companion animals helped women move to shelters quickly but also affirmed women’s mutually respectful relationships with companion animals; (3) shelters also benefited, including expanding support from local communities and opportunities to educate them. The study suggests that by shifting ontological and theoretical approaches and including a critical examination of human–animal relationships at interpersonal and social structural levels, professional education promotes mobilizing resources for women with companion animals.

Against Contextualization: An Ethics of Encounter

Against Contextualization: An Ethics of Encounter

Working from the heart – cultivating feminist care ethics through care farming in Sweden

In this paper we explore why and how women and men farmers carry out care farming, paying attention to farming being gendered. We engage in geographical research on feminist care ethics to understand care farming by considering the people-place relationships cultivated. We draw on post-structural feminist understandings of gendered farm subjectivities, thereby exploring the emergence of new gender subjectivities. The paper fills research gaps on farmers providing care, and on the gendered nature of care farming. To the feminist geographic theorisations on feminist care ethics, we contribute a post-structural feminist approach. Empirically, the study builds on farm visits and 20 semi-structured interviews with women and men engaged in care farming on 12 farms in rural Sweden. We conclude that care farmers cultivate feminist care ethics as an ontology of connections, by working from the heart. This has meant care farmers are developing people-place and people-people connections. Feminist care ethics is, on the one hand a way of expressing criticism of current societal developments such as productivist agriculture and efficiency orientated welfare provisioning and, on the other, a way of making a difference. Feminist care ethics also includes the development of new gender subjectivities for both women and men farmers. We suggest that care farming implies farming otherwise, which shifts the farms to places of care, instead of food production. Altogether, we argue that care farmers nurturing feminist care ethics challenge the very conceptualisation of agriculture – from cultivating animals and plants to cultivating connections.

Constructing a ‘Different’ Strength: A Feminist Exploration of Vulnerability, Ethical Agency and Care

This article explores how ethical agency, as ‘other-oriented’ caring, emerged from feelings of being ‘different’ in a cultural organization by drawing on feminist ethics of care. By analyzing interview material from an ethnographic study, we centralize the relationship between feelings of being ‘different,’ vulnerability and the development of sensibilities, practices and imaginaries of care. We elaborate on how vulnerability serves as a ground for caring with rather than for others, and illustrate how it allowed individuals to challenge both organizational, normative diversity discourses and essentialization of differences. We contribute to the literature on critical diversity management by furthering problematizations of instrumental diversity management from the perspective of care, and to the organizational literature on feminist care ethics by empirically exploring how ethical agency emerges from tensions related to feeling ‘different.’ While previous studies have shown how marginalized individuals use their sense of ‘otherness’ to negotiate, conform to and resist organizational norms, practices and discourses, we provide further insights on how it also can drive concern and care for others, and thus serve as possible ground for ethical change initiatives within organizations.

Critical friendship: an alternative, ‘care-full’ way to play the academic game

The severe impact of the neoliberal university has been commonly acknowledged, particularly for women academics. Feminist conceptualisations of academic work highlight that meaningful relationships in the workspace and care ethics in academia are practices of resistance against the neoliberal academy, including those of friendship and mentorship. In this paper, we add critical academic friendship to this repertoire of practices aligning with feminist care ethics and propose it as a way of working within the neoliberal academy slowly and meaningfully. Critical friendship is a practice often used by teacher educators to assist engagement in self-reflection and constructive critical dialogue among colleagues as a means to aid both personal and professional development. Inspired by our personal experience as critical academic friends and using an autoethnographic approach, the paper outlines how our critical friendship developed and was practiced. We highlight how time, space and neoliberal academic practices all influence how this relationship unfolded. Through showcasing how engaging in critical friendship helped us (re)produce robust feminist personal and professional identities, we hope to inspire more academics to share similar experiences, to intensify the message that engaging in ‘care-full’ relationships is paramount for resisting the pressures of neoliberal academic work and for ‘doing’ academia differently and more meaningfully.

Epistemic and ethical considerations in the direct-to-consumer health and ancestry genetic testing process

Background: Direct-to-consumer genetic testing (DTC-GT) is a popular and fast-growing field within the healthcare industry. Consumers often pursue DTC-GT without a clear understanding of its epistemic and medical limitations. This report will present the current state of DTC-GT technology, and highlight the ethical, legal and social issues of DTC-GT. Methods: Quantitative methods such as systematic reviews were used to evaluate the field of DTC-GT. Experimental data was taken from randomized control trials and case studies of 23andMe. Qualitative methods such as newspaper articles and surveys were also used. Relevant policies and regulatory information were analyzed in the context of 23andMe. Broader ethical issues are analyzed from the social disability model and feminist ethics frameworks. Results: Several aspects of direct-to-consumer genetic testing are outlined: (i) regulatory and legal distinctions of DTC-GT that separate its use from conventional genetic testing, (ii) epistemic issues of the genetic testing process within the direct-to-consumer context, and (iii) ethical considerations of DTC-GT in regard to genetic health and genetic ancestry. Conclusion: This report does not take a position for or against the use of DTC-GT; rather, it highlights the key ethical issues often missed in the DTC-GT process. There is no perfect method for understanding genetic health and race. DTC-GT offer consumers the ease and power of taking genetic data ‘in their own hands’, at the cost of exacerbating geneticization and race essentialism. Until further work is done to address the epistemic, regulatory and legal issues, ethical implications of DTC-GT usage will continue to exist.

Methodologies of possibility: feminist ethics as justice-oriented research

The primary goal of this paper is to introduce ethical practices engaged by the Feminist Research Collective (FRC) so that we might push into the theoretical dialogue on feminist ethics. The authors offer a corrective to feminist communitarian ethics that advances its justice potential through research by both critiquing and developing feminist communitarianism toward research practices. The authors draw on the work of the FRC re-envision methodologies of possibility, linking theories of praxis, communitarianism, and feminism to link collective social justice with methodological engagements. The paper is organized into four sections: (a) Feminist Communities: Communitarian Ethics and Utopianism; (b) Feminist Ethics as Collective Resistance; (c) Feminist Ethics as Methodologies of Possibility; and (d) Feminist Justice Ethics: Communitarianism Re-Envisioned Through the Praxis of Methodologies of Possibility.

Living bioethics, theories and children's consent to heart surgery.

This analysis is about practical living bioethics and how law, ethics and sociology understand and respect children's consent to, or refusal of, elective heart surgery. Analysis of underlying theories and influences will contrast legalistic bioethics with living bioethics. In-depth philosophical analysis compares social science traditions of positivism, interpretivism, critical theory and functionalism and applies them to bioethics and childhood, to examine how living bioethics may be encouraged or discouraged. Illustrative examples are drawn from research interviews and observations in two London paediatric cardiac units. This paper is one of a series on how the multidisciplinary cardiac team members all contribute to the complex mosaic of care when preparing and supporting families' informed consent to surgery. The living bioethics of justice, care and respect for children and their consent depends on theories and practices, contexts and relationships. These can all be undermined by unseen influences: the history of adult-centric ethics; developmental psychology theories; legal and financial pressures that require consent to be defined as an adult contract; management systems and daily routines in healthcare that can intimidate families and staff; social inequalities. Mainstream theories in the clinical ethics literature markedly differ from the living bioethics in clinical practices. We aim to contribute to raising standards of respectful paediatric bioethics and to showing the relevance of virtue and feminist ethics, childhood studies and children's rights.

Feminist by Design and Designed by Diverse Feminists: Reflections on a Community Network Project in Brazil

The field of feminist infrastructures has shown that technologies are not neutral and, in fact, embody patriarchal and colonial assumptions. The emerging literature and practices of this field show that feminist infrastructures are not limited to the status-quo—there will always be escapes and hacks. By carrying out a two-year action-research project on community networks and feminist infrastructure in a traditionally black Brazilian community (the quilombos), we realised that social interactions with autonomous infrastructure and networks are intersected by discussions, conflicts and negotiations. Similarly, so is the process of researching.<br/> What are the challenges when translating feminist intentions to building infrastructure and digital networks while doing participatory research? This article explores what feminist by design means in our experience. Our main sources of information are the field notes and partial reports from our action-research project, the literature reviewed in this process, and semi-structured interviews conducted with community members. Rather than arriving at final answers, we intend to reflect on what we learned from our project. We hope to open our own experience to others and promote knowledge exchange around feminist practices, ethics, technologies and research.

Feminist Internet Research Is Messy

Feminist internet research is messy and conducting meta-research on feminist internet research is even messier. This is a critically reflective article on the author's experience conducting a meta-research project on the feminist internet research methodologies and ethical frameworks of the eight Feminist Internet Research Network (FIRN) research projects. The piece argues that the messiness of research is not something to shy away from but rather to embrace.<br/> Mess and messiness are that which are often cleaned up, hidden, discarded or outright ignored before, during or after the research process. This article explores the messiness of conducting a meta-research project, reflecting on the research process; doing justice to the stories that are shared; and lastly, what critique means in light of feminist ethics of care. I put forward three recommendations for engaging with mess in research: reflexivity; reaching out to others; and embracing messiness as care. This article is no way exhaustive but is a call to invite and bravely embrace the messy into the research process in order to elicit new knowledge.

Hello, Twitter Bot!: Towards a Bot Ethics of Response and Responsibility

In this paper, we explore the troubles and potentials at stake in the developments and deployments of lively technologies like Twitter bots, and how they challenge traditional ideas of ethical responsibility. We suggest that there is a tendency for bot ethics to revolve around the desire to differentiate between bot and human, which does not address what we understand to be the cultural anxieties at stake in the blurring boundaries between human and technology. Here we take some tentative steps towards rethinking and reimagining bot-human relationships through a feminist ethics of responsibility as response by taking as our starting point our own experience with bot creation, the Twitter bot “Hello30762308.” The bot was designed to respond with a “hello” to other Twitter users’ #hello, but quickly went in directions not intended by its creators.

Jewish Environmental Ethics for the Anthropocene: An Integrative Approach

Abstract This article argues that the Judaic understanding of creation care is a potent response to the challenges of the Anthropocene because Judaism acknowledges that humans have much in common with all other created beings, while respecting their alterity, and because Judaism insists on human responsibility toward and care of the created world. However, Jewish environmental ethics of care and responsibility could be greatly enriched if it incorporates the insights of the feminist ethics of care, ecofeminism, and environmental virtue ethics, three discourses to which Jewish environmentalists have paid limited attention so far, even though the secularization of Judaism in the twentieth century has impacted these discourses.

Catholic Feminist Ethics and Its Localization Prospect in the East-Asia Region (Take China as an Example)

With the unceasing liberation of people’s ideology, the promotion of women’s rights has been raised to unprecedented importance in today’s society. Therefore, more and more theologists have started to re-examine the conventional Catholic doctrines through a critical lens, especially under the framework of moral philosophy. The author aims to explore two main conceptions deep-rooted in Catholic traditions or sacred books that are considered to convey gender inequality, for one decrees the inferior of the gender female to the gender male while the other emphasizes women’s obedience to men’s instructions. In addition, the author analyzes the origin of such conceptions, the dualistic theory, and how renowned Catholic feminists such as Margret Farley and Lisa Cahill managed to develop new comprehension towards Catholicism based on Catholic feminist ethics. While the modern spiritual movements are predominantly derived from Western experience, the application of theological innovations in the East-Asia region still depends on different, complex religious realities. In this article, the author takes China as an example and investigates how secularization may encourage the practice of Catholic feminist reformations in China.

Caring for Worldviews in Early Childhood Education: Theoretical and Analytical Tool for Socially Sustainable Communities of Care

Societies of today are becoming increasingly pluralistic. This applies also to the diversity of values and worldviews in Swedish early childhood education and care (ECEC). Still, in the increasingly secular contexts, societal hegemony often fails to include children’s home religions and worldviews in the actions and understandings aiming towards inclusiveness. We argue that it is of critical importance to also include the plurality of worldviews in the educational perception of “the whole child” in the care and education taking place in ECEC. The purpose of this article is to connect the discussions in the fields of intercultural and interreligious education, in particular those dealing with the diversity of religions and worldviews, to discussions on care and social sustainability in ECEC. The UN Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development promotes inclusive and equitable education, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child states children’s right to freedom of religion and a concern for the spiritual, moral, and social development. Our previous findings have illustrated the importance of religions and worldviews in the intercultural work within early childhood education, both empirically and conceptually, and as part of the moral core of teaching. This article employs feminist and postcolonial ethics of care as a theoretical lens in elaborating on the three key notions: social sustainability, care, and worldviews. Several discursive challenges that ECEC teachers in Sweden face in their work, to enhance social sustainability by supporting the child’s well-being and sense of belonging in the ECEC, have been outlined. To conclude, we bring forth a theoretical and analytical tool for the understanding, researching, and planning of socially sustainable communities of care.

A Feminist Ethic of Care for the Veterinary Profession.

I can still see the dog's face as its eyes connected with mine, framed by the black bin bag it had been carried in. I can still hear the clicking sound, louder than the animal's shrill cries, made by a mass of maggots moving against one another beneath the dogs matted fur, moistened by fluids leaking from its damaged flesh. My hands were shaking with panic and rage and I could hardly draw up the euthatal into the syringe quickly enough. I wanted to put an end to this, immediately. As the lethal fluid flowed into the tiny vein the dog's body finally relaxed. At my hand, like so many others, she had ceased to exist. Through the window I could see her owners waiting outside in the sunshine to pay me and I thought about the silky feel of the fur which covered an expensively shaped head. I knew this dog was loved once.This paper develops two neglected areas of veterinary thought; anthropological studies of the veterinary profession and feminist care approaches in veterinary ethics. I argue that the development of veterinary anthropology is crucial to advancing our understanding of veterinary lived experiences, through highlighting the previously under acknowledged emotional, relational and contextual realities of veterinary practice. I further propose that an ethic of care for the veterinary profession, which meaningfully connects with veterinary lived experiences, may provide a valuable approach through which to further develop veterinary ethical thinking. I share an autoethnographic account of a difficult veterinary encounter, which I then analyse using a novel feminist care approach. Through analyses centered on both emotional and relational aspects of veterinary care, I challenge the boundaries of traditional veterinary ethical approaches in terms of the scope, scale and complexity of veterinary ethical decision making. I describe the concept of emotional sponge work in veterinary practice and outline its potential impact for advancing understanding of both veterinary well-being and the profession's societal role. Finally, I propose that a feminist ethic of care might provide a framework for redefining the focus of veterinary professional responsibility, beyond animal health and toward the maintenance of healthy relationships between humans and animals.

Care Ethics, Bruno Latour, and the Anthropocene

Bruno Latour is one of the founding figures in social network theory and a broadly influential systems thinker. Although his work has always been relational, little scholarship has engaged the relational morality, ontology, and epistemology of feminist care ethics with Latour’s actor–network theory. This article is intended as a translation and a prompt to spur further interactions. Latour’s recent publications, in particular, have focused on the new climate regime of the Anthropocene. Care theorists are just beginning to address posthuman approaches to care. The argument here is that Latourian analysis is helpful for such explorations, given that caring for the earth and its inhabitants is the dire moral challenge of our time. The aim here is not to characterize Latour as a care theorist but rather as a provocative scholar who has much to say that is significant to care thinking. We begin with a brief introduction to Latour’s scholarship and lexicon, followed by a discussion of care theorist Puig de la Bellacasa’s work on Latour. We then explore recent work on care and the environment consistent with a Latourian approach. The conclusion reinforces the notion that valuing relationality across humans and non-human matter is essential to confronting the Anthropocene.

Moral Foundations as Ethical Codes in a Brazilian Context

We present a survey of Brazilians on their adoption of a set of ethical rules, the moral foundations. The aim of the study is to characterize the profiles of a sample of adults in terms of their reliance on moral foundations, under the assumption that each moral foundation represents an ethical code, considering social variables such as gender, schooling level, and religion. Ethical rules consist in associations of evaluative assessments with systems of practices concerning social relationships, while ethical codes are those rules legitimated by communities’ conventions. We administered an adapted version ofthe Moral Foundations Questionnaire to 936 adults inpublic places. Results from cluster analysis revealedthe existence of two broad response patterns that weinterpreted as ethical codes, a liberal ethic that prioritizes the individual, associated with higher educational levels, and a pluralistic code that values both individual and group relations, linked to lower schooling. Brazil’s history of inequity and authoritarian relationships explains apparent contradictions in the individualizing pattern, the modernization of the pluralistic code, and their ideological conflict. The discussion focuses onpossible interpretations of the identified codes, commenting on the specificity of the study and limitations of usual survey strategies.

From care ethics to pluralist care theory: The state of the field

AbstractIn a moment where needs for care are acute and their provision precarious, feminist care ethics has gained new relevance as a framework for understanding and responding to necessary interdependence. This article reviews and evaluates two long‐standing critiques of care ethics in light of this recent research. First, I assess what I call the pluralist feminist critique, or the dispute over the ability of care ethics to address the needs and histories of a range of marginalized subjects. I identify two forms of this critique: the first disputes the biased starting points shaping the development of the theory, and the second concerns the weaponization of care in support of domination. Although these critiques are well‐established, I draw attention to recent responses that move care theory in generative directions. I argue that the pluralist feminist critique demands both self‐critical transformation in dialog with other feminist schools of thought and a robust account of care ethics' normative authority. I then take up critiques those levied by mainstream ethicists concerned with care theory's adequacy as an ethical approach. I show that recent work on normative authority, conceptual uniqueness, and the grounding of responsibility must be engaged before care theory can be dismissed as “under‐theorized.” In articulating these two sets of critiques and evaluating recent rebuttals to them, I argue for a pluralist feminist theory of care within which strands informed by varying philosophical schools and methods can coexist.