Feminist Care Ethics Research Articles

Attuning smart home scripts to household and energy care

Past techno-feminist studies have shown that smart home technologies (SHTs) have inadvertently increased household demand for energy and reinforced gender disparities. This confirms the need to gauge any changes in smart home visions, given that the domestication of SHTs depends on accurate and reliable technology and messages to householders. To determine whether smart home visions are now supporting more gender-equitable household practices and energy efficiency, a content analysis of marketing materials (n = 36) is presented. In the context of domestication and the concept of agency scripts, the results show that smart home visions continue to disregard diverse household types and fail to address either energy efficiency or the housework burdens placed on women. This triggers an enquiry into the negative implications for both women’s wellbeing and energy-saving goals. Feminist care ethics indicate how smart home visions can be attuned to promote gender-equitable household practices and energy reduction. By accenting the mutual interdependence between humans and technologies and developing a household care practice approach, a realignment of smart home visons towards a care ethic is proposed. Strategies for repurposing SHTs as technologies of care that care for householders and the environment are offered in conclusion. Practice relevanceThis research reveals that current smart home principles continue to circumvent energy-efficiency goals and reinforce the gender disparities implicated in the household adoption, integration and management of SHTs. The smart home industry and government policy are advised to develop and implement ethical smart home principles designed to shape the technology in ways that foster gender-equitable household practices and energy reduction. A realignment of smart home visions is advocated towards principles of caregiving, tailored specifically to the objectives of serving the care needs of householders and the environment. A series of strategies is proposed for practitioners and policymakers to facilitate the repurposing of SHTs as care technologies.

Seeing as an Act of Hearing: Making Visible Children’s Experiences of the COVID-19 Pandemic Through Participatory Animation

‘Our Voices’ is an animation co-created with children aged 9–11 during the 2020–2021 global pandemic. A short, stop-start animation of children’s visual, audio and textual representations of their experiences offers a visceral account of the pandemic in England from their perspectives. In making available the animation in this inaugural issue of ‘Beyond the Text’, we have two key aims. The first is to enable children, who have been barely seen and little heard during the pandemic, to voice their experiences in accordance with their aspirations. The second is to reflect upon the process of transforming creative data made by and with children into an animation that is representative of children’s diverse experiences and acknowledges their contributions in ways which enable audiences to engage through ‘seeing’. Accordingly, our accompanying text explores how, through a feminist ethics of care, we sought to co-produce an animation with children which delivers key messages from them and acknowledges their role as co-researchers while maintaining their anonymity. In describing our methodological and ethical practices, we aspire to make visible the relational, dialogic processes inherent in co-production, offering viewers a way of seeing the complexity of children’s experiences through the multi-layered affordances of participatory animation.

Care-full pedagogy: Conceptualizing feminist care ethics as an overarching critical framework to interrupt the dominance of developmentalism within post-secondary early childhood education programs

This article offers a theoretical provocation through conceptualizing a pedagogy of care as a means of caring with students and each other to interrupt the dominance of developmentalism in Canadian post-secondary early childhood education programs. The authors’ conceptualization of care -full as pedagogy is rooted in the premises that education is always ethical and political, and caring about, for and with others is necessary to establish equitable, democratic spaces at the post-secondary level. In contrast to the developmental framework embraced in many Canadian post-secondary early childhood education programs, the authors describe how a critical, care -full overarching pedagogical framework provides room for educators and students to deeply and meaningfully explore developmentalism and other theoretical frameworks. They argue that a pedagogy of care rooted in feminist care ethics and Freire's critical theory can contribute to establishing a safe learning climate where developmentalism can be critiqued and alternative ways to think about children's development can be contested, explored and debated. As the authors are conceptualizing it, a care-full pedagogical framework intentionally supports the intellectual, ethical and political risk-taking necessary for critique and alternative thinking. They follow this provocation through by imagining what a care -full pedagogy might look and feel like in a post-secondary early childhood education course on child development.

Just care! Rethinking the uneven geographies of care

After COVID-19 was characterised as a pandemic in spring 2020, care and care work became very dominant topics in public discourse in Western Europe. Against this backdrop, the paper turns to the underlying social structures and conditions of caring relations and aims to go before and beyond the pandemic. The serious occasion of the COVID-19 pandemic and its unjust social effects will be taken as a starting point to engage with social theory to discuss pre-existing uneven ‘geographies of caring relations’ in capitalist societies, which pandemic-related measures are built on. For this, the paper draws on Joan Tronto’s extended thoughts on critical feminist care ethics, emphasising her notion of caring-with as the possibility to trust in caring relations based on interdependencies and solidarity, and argues for explicitly linking caring relations to questions of social justice. This framework stresses the foundations of social injustice and shifts the perspective from individual caring subjects and places (‘who and where’) to unjust social structures (‘how’). Moreover, it challenges dominant biopolitics and care economies by way of an insourcing of caring relationships. By conceiving care as part of social theory and not only social analyses, care ethics provide a normative framework for geography and beyond to imagine and practise social change.

Strangers at Home? Informal Hosting of Undocumented Migrants and the Ambivalences of Encounter, Compassion, and Care in the Private Sphere

Through a feminist care ethics lens, this paper explores the particular caring relations of Hébergement, an informal hosting initiative for transitory undocumented migrants in Brussels. It elaborates on how the intimate, private setting of hosting at home affects a caring-with relationship. Hosting and being hosted significantly differs from other forms of shelter and migrant (or homeless) support. There is no script for this particular social constellation. Hosting requires trust and a great deal of physical and emotional labor of all involved and often leads to exhaustion. Being together in and sharing the intimate space of the home entails a continuous negotiation of—sometimes conflicting—needs (for space, intimacy, distance, self-care, etc.) of all at home. The informal caring arrangements and the resulting relations of Hébergement are ambivalent and are understood as yet another expression of the lack of sufficient and adequate caring resources on a societal level (‘care crisis’). With its fundamentally relational approach, feminist care ethics unravel the uneven structures that permeate and define both the practice of care and caring relations. Thereby, it challenges the structural organization of care in capitalism that is exclusive, racialized, inherently feminized, domesticized, privatized, and individualized and envisions an alternative, more just social organization of care—in a caring-with society. Drawing on narrative interviews, the paper explores how strangers encounter each other ‘at home’, how they care-with each other, and how they address the potentials, ambivalences, and limits of hosting and caring-with strangers at home.

Do cities enable caring-with men? An ordinary politics of urban care

This critical commentary unpacks the promise of care-full and just cities, and how men are understood as subjects of urban care. Overall, my discussion offers a generative space that forwards the situated practices of caring-with men as ordinary politics in order to fully realise the promise of a city for everyone. The main body is divided into three sections. The first section revisits the concept of care-full cities as an alternative vision of the city grounded in feminist ethics of care and justice. Here I aim to expand the discussion on men as subjects of urban care to consider the diverse performances of masculinities in relation to economic conditions, social meanings, and cultural norms which structure spaces and subjectivities of care giving/-receiving. In the second section, I conceptualise caring-with men as ordinary politics shaping the contested relations and place-making practices in the city. Here I highlight that caring-with involves transversal logics and heterogenous politics that enrich how care as a cultural value and everyday practice can be embodied, reinforced, or even neglected among certain groups of men. The last section provides a synthesis and several key reflections on the (im)possibilities of caring-with men in culturally diverse cities. The situated understandings of care giving/-receiving amongst men in the city inspire crosscurrents and interdisciplinary synthesis across bodies of work in urban studies, feminist care geographies and gender/sexuality studies. In conclusion, caring-with men as ordinary politics is a step towards encouraging situated and comparative inquiries through consolidating a hybrid praxis of global urban masculinities.

Exploring the significance of relationality, care and governmentality in families, for understanding women's classed alcohol drinking practices.

In this paper we explore the importance of relationality and care for understanding women’s alcohol use, using a theoretical framework comprising concepts from feminist ethics of care, the sociology of personal life, and feminist approaches to governmentality. A key focus is how care giving responsibilities and expectations in families appear to be particularly significant for creating or constraining possibilities for drinking practices. We draw on findings from a qualitative study about alcohol use and stress with 26 women, aged 24-67 years, in the North East of England, UK. We consider how care practices in families feature in the accounts of alcohol use by women with and without children, and how the symbolic and material aspects of social class interact with care to alter the drinking practices women engage in. The interpretation extends scholarship on women’s drinking, by adopting a relational approach to identity and linking private care practices and alcohol use to social and political structures. Public health approaches for preventing or reducing heavy drinking practices are predominantly situated within biomedical or psychological paradigms. Intervention approaches to reduce women’s drinking that draw on our theoretical framework could offer potential for reducing harmful alcohol use in a more meaningful way.

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.

Care Ethics and Paternalism: A Beauvoirian Approach

Feminist care ethics has become a prominent ethical theory that influenced theoretical and practical discussions in a variety of disciplines and institutions on a global scale. However, it has been criticized by transnational feminist scholars for operating with Western-centric assumptions and registers, especially by universalizing care as it is practiced in the Global North. It has also been criticized for prioritizing gender over other categories of intersectionality and hence for not being truly intersectional. Given the imperialist and colonial legacies embedded into the unequal distribution of care work across the globe, a Western-centric approach may also carry the danger of paternalism. Hence, a critical approach to care ethics would require reckoning with these challenges. The aim of this article is first to unfold these discussions and the responses to them from care ethics scholars and then to present resources in Beauvoir’s existentialist ethics, specifically the tenet of treating the other as freedom, as productive tools for countering the Western-centric and paternalistic aspects of care practices.

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.

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.

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.

Keep calm, the corridor will be open soon

This article explores the creative practice of an independent Russian theatre collective, Soso Daughters. The collective was founded in Moscow by theatredirector and playwright Zhenya Berkovich in 2018 and recently premiered their fourth production. The subjects of the productions the collective performsoften delve into girls’ and women’s lives and traumatic experiences that are constantly undermined, dismissed or ignored. Driven by the feminist ethic ofcare, this article aims to situate Soso Daughters’ creative work in the context of scan-aesthetic across the Nordic and Baltic regions, and to turn scholars andspectators’ attention to the issue of an independent theatre practice in Russia. The article is based on interviews with the collective’s director and scenographer as well as first-hand observations of their productions. The article further explores the possibility of representation of trauma and traumatic experience in The Rhyme, the collective’s first production, grounding the analysis in that the holistic approach to scenography.

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.

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.

Blaming from Inside the Birdcage

This article notices a trend in work done by philosophers who build on P. F. Strawson’s account of the reactive attitudes; it looks as though philosophers supplement Strawson with (or claim that Strawson has underlying commitments to) a more robust ethical program in order to address questions concerning the moral appropriateness of the reactive attitudes. I argue feminist care ethics can serve as a promising moral supplement to Strawson. Then, I diagnose a problem in Strawson— namely, the assumption that members of moral communities will express all three kinds of reactive attitudes (toward the self, directly toward others, and indirectly on behalf of others). Once we consider these three expressions from a feminist perspective, it becomes clear that while some may express indignation on behalf of others and guilt toward themselves, many will not express resentment directly toward others for good reasons under oppressive conditions.

Educational technologies as matters of care

ABSTRACT Schools, teaching, and learning environments have long been understood and idealised as places of care. Within feminist studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS), scholars have proposed a shift to include non-humans in what we propose to conceive as care arrangements. Drawing on Tronto's feminist ethics of care [1993. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. Routledge], we investigate educational technologies as ‘matters of care’, facilitating and enabling different modes of care. We pay particular attention to the role that educational technologies assume in schools’ care arrangements. The paper is based on a study of four school information systems in Germany. We identify how these systems can be conceived of as antagonists, intermediaries, recipients of care or means to receive care and critically reflect on how this allows us to imagine modes of care with technology in order to create good educational futures.

A Critical Feminist Approach from the Geosciences to Transform Workplace Climate in Partnership with Professional Associations

The ADVANCEGeo Partnership program for transforming workplace climate is informed by critical feminist approaches that seek to disrupt inequities in strongly gendered and racialized disciplines. The program’s main organizational change intervention is a community-based model for bystander intervention education, informed by a feminist ethics of care. Persistent demographic trends in the geosciences required an intersectional framework and a focus on exclusionary behaviors that lead to hostile climates. This approach also responds to unique challenges of disciplines with strong field training and research, by recognizing that sexism, racism, ableism, homophobia and transphobia jeopardize field safety. The program also promotes policies that identify harassment, bullying and discrimination as research misconduct and leverage collaborations with professional associations to transform culture in a discipline.