Feminist Ethics Research Articles

Feminisms in the Archives

The complex relationship between archival records and institutions, power, and history making is a shared concern of both archival and feminist research and praxis. This paper reports key findings of a critical literature review that examines the presence and prevalence of critical feminist theories, practices, and approaches employed in archival studies research between 1973-2024. Our key findings highlight how feminist approaches not only serve archival studies research that aims to promote visibility, credibility, control, and care to communities whose voices have been systematically excluded from mainstream archives but also encourages an array of archival functions and practices embedded in critical intersectional feminist values, methods, and ethics.

Ecosocial Care Ethics in and through Dance Education

ABSTRACT Building on the critical ideas of feminist and posthuman care ethics, this theoretical study presents three practical approaches to dance education that foster deeper care and connection with the more-than-human world. We propose that through dance education, it is possible to 1) practice presence, 2) revitalize embodied empathy, and 3) imagine more responsible relationships with all living beings. Grounded in somatic practices and movement improvisations, these approaches encourage students to deepen their relational awareness and ethical engagement with the ecosocial community. By integrating our perspectives as dance practitioners with existing scholarship, we elucidate how these practices can inspire transformative shifts toward a more sustainable future. Ultimately, we propose that by nurturing responsible multispecies connections and a culture of ecosocial care, dance education can serve as a potent force for cultivating environmental ethics in the face of escalating social and ecological crises.

Women and Housing After the Lismore Floods (Australia)–A Relational Rights-Based Approach

Australia is experiencing both a housing crisis and an increase in extreme weather events due to global warming. This largely dry continent, beset by bushfires and floods, is a land of stark inequality. These inequitable landscapes make recovery from disaster difficult and prolonged for those already marginalised. National statistics reveal that older women are the fastest growing group facing housing precarity, and disasters compound upon this dire situation. This paper presents a relational rights-based approach, informed by a feminist ethics of care, to attain the right to adequate housing for all in the Australian context.

The Politics of Vulnerability Concerning Sexual and Spiritual Abuse in the Catholic Church

This article addresses methodological approaches to the study of vulnerable cohorts with specific attention to definitions of the term vulnerability. In particular, it investigates the issue of adults, particularly women, who have experienced abuse in the Catholic Church. Relevant analysis in this area is primarily interdisciplinary-based research and includes sociological and psychological perspectives and theological and historical analysis. This article critically analyzes the current definitions of vulnerability in Church and research contexts, and the methodological approaches utilized in defining vulnerable cohorts. It argues that specific ethical principles and methodological strategies are required to safeguard participants and researchers guided by the principles of feminist ethics. These include (1) attention to the uses and definitions of key terms by participants and researchers; (2) identifying the positionality of researchers as central to an ethical standpoint including their exposure to secondary trauma; and (3) establishing inclusive methods such as participatory research and sensitive recruitment. Paying attention to ongoing issues experienced by cohorts identified as vulnerable in research, including the stigmatization of their status, marginalization of their cases, and trauma of disclosure alongside ongoing risk assessment, is central to the research design process.

Examining peer mentoring with women who experience multiple and complex disadvantage: a feminist ethical model of practice

ABSTRACT Despite the recognized strengths and benefits of peer mentoring as a process, this practice remains an underexplored area for women in communities who experience multiple and complex disadvantage linked to trauma. This article explores the perspectives of those who deliver and receive peer mentoring, with the aim of building a more comprehensive understanding of such practice in developing a model of peer mentoring based on feminist ethics of care. Three women’s organizations located in England participated in this study and in-depth, semi-structured interviews were undertaken with decision makers (n = 5), peer mentors (n = 11) and mentees (n = 8). This research is framed within feminist qualitative research where reflexive thematic analysis considered the findings from the data collected from 24 interviews (Braun & Clarke, 2022). The findings from this study identify that peer mentoring is a complex form of community level support that provides a welcome approach from the more formal, statutory, community provision many women with multiple and complex disadvantage experience. A feminist ethical model of delivery is devised within this article to be considered within women’s sector community practice. The elements of the model being: community strength, meeting expressed need and having clear feminist ethical foundations of trust and care.

Human Formation in the Age of Automation

ABSTRACTThis chapter responds to the recent crisis surrounding developments in large language models (LLMs) and generative AI with a relational view of education informed by the emerging world‐centered approach to education and a synthesis of personalist character formation with feminist care ethics. It proposes that the instinct to manage student use of generative AI with carceral practices, characterized by surveillance and control, undermines the project of forming students as whole persons who can evaluate and use or reject emerging technologies in a mature way. The chapter concludes with practical suggestions for the classroom that can be aligned with institutional strategic plans.

Transparent Reflexivity: How to Exude Neutrality and Navigate Gatekeeping Through Shifting Positionality?

Gaining access to interviewees when carrying out qualitative research is a time-consuming, challenging undertaking. When face to face with gatekeepers, the work of convincing them to share their contacts and knowledge is not over, particularly when the research involves antagonistic groups and the researcher’s positionality can be scrutinized in relation to that. In this article, based on my field work on hydraulic fracturing and its socioenvironmental impacts in Appalachia, I explore how my positionality shifted while being vouched for by funders and industry representatives. Additionally, I show how being probed due to my institutional affiliation, origin, and disciplinary background required me to strive to be perceived as neutral, in direct opposition to my feminist ethics, for the sake of ingratiating myself with gatekeepers. I problematize how this behavior was necessary as a first-year untenured faculty in the context of neoliberal academia, where I had to ensure meeting the funders’ expectations and paving the way for potential future additional funding and job security.

Meeting People Where They Are: Building Community-Centered Care with Smartphone-Facilitated Response to Overdoses

We conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 members who engaged in community-based effort to reverse overdoses using a smartphone-based app in an Eastern United States (U.S.) city. Drawing from feminist ethics of care, we identify how the caring practices of community members extend from administering a medical intervention to building trust and support between the care receivers and caregivers in the case of opioid overdose response. Contrary to the predominant patient-centered care paradigm, we emphasize community-centered care, which acknowledges the resistance of individuals and attends to reallocating caring responsibility and building relationships within the community. Our results highlight how trust intersects with social ecologies of care in the highly stigmatized context of opioid overdose and that trustful and less hierarchical relationships are critical sources of care for groups experiencing marginalization. We discuss applying harm reduction principles in designing health technologies for substance use disorders. We also discuss research and design opportunities for community-centered design for marginalized individuals and community caregivers.

Caring for Form: Ali Smith and Contemporary Refugee Life-Writing

Refugee life writing draws attention to the actual stories behind the statistics (100 million refugees worldwide, more than 3,000 people drowned while attempting to cross the Mediterranean in 2023 alone) and calls for solidarity across national and ethnic divides. A particularly poignant, but also provocative example of such an act of solidarity is the Refugee Tales project, in which established literary authors collaborate with refugees to relate stories of war, flight, loss, and the brutality of asylum systems in the West. This paper explores the ethical dimensions of telling somebody else’s life zooming in on the example of “The Detainee’s Tale as told to Ali Smith.” Unlike many of the other tales, Smith explains the process of visiting and interviewing two refugees trapped in the British asylum system. While the research on the ethics of Refugee Tales has focused on the questions of “trust” (Rupp) and “precarity” (Sandten) of the refugee condition, this article chooses a different path. It suggests that the ethical questions arising in “As-Told-To Life Writing” (Lindemann) remain in the shadow if seen only in terms of authenticity of voice. Instead of scrutinising the authority of the real-world author, it is worth redirecting the attention to the narrative discourse and the specific forms it takes. Drawing on Caroline Levine’s social formalism, the article investigates the interplay between political and aesthetic forms. In this collision of forms, “The Detainee’s Tale” unmasks and contests the inhumane side of the British asylum system, but it also carefully gestures towards possible ethical alternatives. The ethical aspects of Smith’s contribution are best described in terms of a feminist ethics of care, which values the moral salience of recognising and attending to the vulnerability of others (see Held).

Resistance and Christian Ethics in Africa

Colonialism in Africa rewarded individuals who offered no resistance to its ideology and demonized those who did. An effect this continues to have on the African moral imagination is the tendency to idealize compliance over resistance, especially to Western hegemony. Given Africa’s sociopolitical struggles and the consequence of the continent’s ongoing entrapment in the colonial power matrix, I explore ways ethical discourses on the continent can contribute to the ongoing interdisciplinary process of decolonization. In engagement with African literature and decolonial studies on the one hand and liberation ethics on the other, this article proposes a Christian ethics for Africa, discussing resistance as both a moral imperative in postcolonial contexts and a constitutive of the Christian identity.

Customary Indian Practices and Neotraditionalism: The Missing Link of Difference

Like knowledge systems of ancient civilizations everywhere, ancient Indian knowledge systems have been recognized for their emphasis on sustainable living practices. There is renewed interest in ‘going back to these roots’, a return to and a rediscovery of traditional knowledge and lifestyles, which we identify as neotraditionalism. Neotraditionalism has emerged in the encounter of the customary with the metropolitan colonial West and is influenced by Western Enlightenment’s liberal ethic of equality. It suffers from a blindness to diversity and difference. In this article, we argue that equality as universal feature of neotraditionalism makes it closer to Western consumer capitalism than it does to customary knowledge and practices. We suggest that modern western capitalism combined with Western Enlightenment’s liberal ethic of equality has eroded our appreciation for the link between difference, diversity and sustainability. Western capitalism is not only about changing modes of production but also about changing modes of consumption: the emergence of mass consumption practices with their emphasis on civic equality was a necessary step in the dismantling of aristocratic hierarchy. Restrictions in social structures hinder the emergence of bigger markets for capitalists and manufacturers. We therefore argue that the preoccupation of neotraditionalism with a universalization of tradition that is blind to jati-based differences and diversities undermines the implicit demand– supply balances that were historically at work within the framework of traditional sacred cultural beliefs and practices. Because of this, neotraditionalism errs on the side of promoting consumer capitalism and thereby eroding its ability to further the achievement of sustainability based on tradition. As such, neotraditionalism needs to delink from the liberal myth of equality and embrace diversity of consumption practices in order to truly enable sustainable lifestyles anchored in ancient Indian knowledge systems.

Making academia suck less: Supporting early career researchers studying harmful content online through a feminist ethics of care

Early career researchers (ECR) in communication and media research face increasing problems and stressors due to systemic challenges in academia, including the precarity of being an ECR and the politicization of research and targeting of researchers. For researchers studying harmful content online (HCO), research-related trauma (RRT) can compound these stressors. In this study, we present results from interviews with 18 ECRs from communication studies and adjacent disciplines studying HCO. We find researchers frequently experience RRT from harmful content, pressure from superiors to conduct research on harmful content, and outside harassment related to their research. In addition, researchers frequently use individualized self-care practices for dealing with RRT or couch their trauma. Drawing from widespread consensus by our participants that their needs are not being institutionally met, we offer a vision of what an ethics of care framework for ECRs should provide.

Becoming my daughter's mother: Attuning relationally

In this paper I explore ideas such as mothering, caring, rules, and responsibilities towards a toddler, whilst methodologically, being influenced by a body of work around a feminist ethics of care. This piece attempts to understand how as a mother who is influenced by academic readings, I can support my child's independence and remain sensitive to her needs while setting some boundaries to keep her safe and prepared for the outside world. To do that, I have drawn on feminist New Materialist and posthuman non-anthropocentric ethics, where researchers continually challenge the assumption of boundaries, for example between agency and humans, ethics and politics, autonomy and dependence. Being entangled with my own ‘theoretical’ trajectory - readings, teachings and my own cultural values, beliefs; personal and professional identity and the practicalities and challenges of the lived experience with my daughter, in this research assemblage, the aim is to apply ideas from a feminist ethics of care to help me understand how to attune with my child more carefully in order to balance the notion of boundary-setting during sleep routines while respecting her need of autonomy.

Towards a framework for care-full teacher learning: stories from the British art show professional development programme

ABSTRACT The education system in England can arguably be characterised as care-less. Art teachers, for example, are rarely offered opportunities to acquire subject-specific knowledges. This paper reports on a programme which supported art teachers to engage with the critical, find comfort with/in the indeterminate, and take up the questioning approach espoused in contemporary arts philosophies. We draw on interviews with fourteen teachers and a feminist ethic of care to suggest that the programme’s focus on particularity, politics and purpose recognised the realpolitik of teachers’ work. Unlike the logic of cause and effect, teachers were trusted to direct their own learning and, over time, they changed their practices. We suggest that this ethical care framework could be more widely used to support transformational teacher learning.

‘Never the twain shall cross’: scripts of children's play and adult desire in Barbie

Greta Gerwig's Barbie (2023) is deeply invested in the liberatory and transformative potential of children's play. Children's play in Barbie is the site of self-actualisation for adult women, whereby the subversive potential of Barbie-play facilitates nostalgia, self-discovery and choice for the film's adult protagonists. This move towards self-actualisation is core to Barbie's feminist ethic, which I argue is a type of ‘commodity feminism’ that reasons that such female empowerment can be marketed and purchased. The invocation of the playing child throughout Barbie, accompanied by scant representations of actual playing children, is central to this ethic, performing what Jacqueline Rose calls a ‘mystification of the child’ as a product of adult desires and anxieties. In Barbie, children's play is a blank screen onto which can be projected adult female desires for self-actualisation, concealing concomitant anxieties about the role of capitalist patriarchy in this commodity-feminist project. Drawing on Robin Bernstein's conception of dolls as ‘scriptive things’, I explore how Barbie and its doll characters script forms of play. I demonstrate that the rhetorical power of children's play can be co-opted into feminism and corporate capitalism alike, and used to disguise the uneasy but often very profitable marriage between the two.

Nurses' Advocacy in Intensive Care: What Insights Can Nurses' Experiences During the Pandemic Reveal?

Patient advocacy must be understood as an ethical component of nursing practice that involves respecting and defending patients' rights and autonomy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the vulnerability of patients in intensive care units (ICUs) increased requiring that nurses advocate for those patients more than ever in a context in which changes in daily nursing practices of care imposed by the pandemic deeply impacted nurses' advocacy. In this study, we examined ICU nurses' patient advocacy during the pandemic, using feminist ethics as a theoretical lens. Twenty-five ICU nurses from Brazil participated in individual interviews. Our findings reflect that advocacy is a moral component of nursing identity. This moral identity represents the identity of nurses as a profession as it represents their values and responsibilities which are social in nature. Although the pandemic challenged nurses' advocacy practices these professionals had an important role to give voice to patients and to preserve their autonomy and dignity, strengthening patient-centered care.

Playing the Game Differently: How Women Leaders in Academia Are Challenging Neopatriarchy

AbstractDespite Australian and New Zealand Universities pledging to address gender inequities, the patriarchal history of universities continues to impact the careers of women in academia. Under-representation of women in senior leadership and a culture of masculinity can lead to a lack of resources for feminist leadership and a devaluing of women’s work. We investigate how women in academic leadership are playing the game differently, making strategic moves to navigate leadership in the neoliberal neopatriarchal academy. We explored the experiences of 22 women in academic leadership through online qualitative surveys and reflexive thematic analysis of the data, taking inspiration from Bourdieu’s work on habitus and doxa. Although women leaders were able to successfully make strategic moves to advance their careers, these were shaped by parenting status, race, culture, and age. The women’s leadership approaches were counter to the masculine doxa of the academic field, leading instead relationally. We do not suggest that there is a specific ‘female’ style of academic leadership, but that successful authentic leadership can be founded on a feminist ethics of care in contrast to neopatriarchy. Adoption of such approaches across the academy might unshackle academics across genders from their positioning in academic leadership hierarchies.

A Research-co-Creation of Care: Feminist Speculation, Collaboration, and Curation in the Decameron 2.0 Virtual Gallery

This paper presents the evolving work of the Decameron Collective, a group of women Canadian scholars and artists who, during the early COVID-19 pandemic (2020–2022), built a body of creative works as an interactive, virtual gallery of visual, audio, and textual media inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353). More than a gloss on Boccaccio’s text, Decameron 2.0 is a feminist project of collaborative and curational worldbuilding. We describe our practice of co-creating and curating, making a case for interdisciplinary praxis-led approaches of research-creation that embody both a mode of inquiry and a practice of feminist ethics and care. We describe the world of Decameron 2.0 – its courtyards, caves, and rooms of spells, and the affordances of the webGL spatial navigation that contributes to the intermediality within and between the works. The intertextual spatialization of works in Decameron 2.0 and the non-linear exploratory affordances of the virtual environment extend into our academic thinking/theorizing through centripetal and centrifugal frames. In homage to the polyphony of mediaeval manuscript culture, and as an intervention against the flattening of so much academic discourse, we use illustrations, hyperlinks, margins, page layout, and metacommentary. This paratextuality illustrates what we call thinking-together and honours the differences among our individual voices and perspectives. This paper contributes to current critical and cultural understandings of making, care, communication, and feminist practice and models how multi-institutional collaboration can be reshaped in the era of and after COVID-19.

Education in the context of liberation ethics. The contributions of E nrique Dussel and Paulo Freire.

Education in the context of liberation ethics. The contributions of E nrique Dussel and Paulo Freire.

Imagining peace and enacting utopias in Puerto Rico

ABSTRACT Local groups in Puerto Rico are often described as being at the forefront of climate transformation. This article explores active struggles towards alternate futures, using a critical concept of utopia in a phenomenological study alongside women at a community organisation in Culebra, Puerto Rico. I use feminist ethics of care as a theory of knowledge to study how cognitive, embodied, and affective visions influence struggles towards utopian futures. The empirical study reveals how women experientially understand climate change through food, livelihoods, and identity in Culebra. They express and imagine futures through orienting dependencies towards reciprocal care; foster place-based belonging through collective relations; and envision alternatives through longing that intertwines past, current, and yet-to-come temporalities. This study contributes to knowledge production about transformation and peace, and underlines the importance of imagination as part of the politics of knowledge.