In the final chapter of ‘Researching with care: applying feminist care ethics to research practice’ (published by Policy Press, 2022) we reflect on what ‘finding’ the ethics of care has meant to us and how it has influenced the research we have done. Those reflections embody what, to us, has been fundamental about feminist care ethics. Marian wrote: Having ‘discovered’ this work, having recognised the way in which thinking with care spoke to discomforts; revealed things that were suppressed; offered a language; an intellectual and political respectability for saying things that felt hard to say, it feels like this way of thinking about the world and my place in it, was always there. This is why Gilligan’s analysis of the silencing that girls and women experience is so powerful. Part of who I am is to try think the world, my relationships with other people, with the environment and non-human animals, with the relational insights of care ethics. I try to act with care, and I feel uncomfortable when I acknowledge how hard this is and how I get it wrong.   But thinking with care enables me to be more attentive, to myself and others, and not to resist what my emotional responses tell me about what matters. I recognise that, both personally and politically, neither I nor others can do justice without care. (p.147) This entanglement between personal, professional and political, its relevance to so many aspects of our relationships with ourselves and the world in which we live, gives power to an ethics that is not afraid to recognise and embody the messiness of life and how hard it is to live well with others in the different contexts in which we are engaged. As work on the ethics of care has matured it has become a source of critical reflection, thoughtful analysis and political challenge across a wide range of policy and practice arenas, as well as enabling insight and understanding of the dilemmas and joys of interpersonal relationships. In architecture, environmental and soil sciences, probation practice, as well as public health, pre-school child care and long term care for old people, contexts more obviously conceptualised as contexts for care, feminist care ethics has offered a distinctive perspective from which to not only critique the sterility and failures of neoliberalism, colonialism and human exceptionalism, but to offer a way towards renewal. Fisher and Tronto’s inclusion of the need for ‘repair’ in their definition of what caring can offer has powerful resonances with increasing acknowledgement of the damage humanity has caused and the existential necessity of action to respond to this. Thus, in applying feminist care ethics to the practice of research, to highlight the necessity of not only thinking but also doing with care, we hope to speak to researchers working across a range of contexts where there is recognition of the significance of relational as well as ethical and methodological competence in undertaking this work. We draw on our own experience as researchers working across a range of ‘care’ contexts: including mental health, ageing, unpaid care, public health, but also participatory governance and collective action amongst survivors and service users, and work involving collaboration with indigenous people in the context of colonialism. But we also broadened our discussion of the value of care ethics in research practice by talking with others working in different contexts. This included a woman with experience as a ‘peer researcher’ on a project on well-being in old age and another working in an NGO involved in an academic/voluntary sector collaboration whose relationships to the research and motivations for involvement started in a different place from that of academic researchers. And we also drew on other academic work that enabled us to see into research worlds of which we have no experience. We will be forever grateful to Donna Haraway for, amongst other things, offering the example of collaborative research involving pigeons as both data collectors and potential beneficiaries of research into air pollution! How to ensure that their involvement did not put them in danger of harm from predatory hawks is a helpful reminder that we need to be careful not to cause further harm when we invite people experiencing oppressions and injustices to research with us. The conversations we entered into as we were writing the book emphasised the significance of deliberative and dialogic approaches to knowledge generation. Sometimes that involves conversations that take place across cultural differences and it is here that our own and others’ experiences of work with indigenous peoples offered valuable insights. We cite the experience of a historian listening to an Aboriginal rights activist: ‘Aunty Anne talks in circles. Big and little ones, beautiful and incomplete. They intersect and encircle past, present, herself and the world and me….The first time I heard her speak I struggled to make sense. I searched for a linear order, a spatio-temporal scale to slide up and down, a before and after, a cause, and its ethical effects.’ (Hughes-Warrington and Martin, 2022, p.187) But we also relate this to one of the things that Bunty, the older peer researcher reflected on when she spoke about the experience of taking part in wellbeing research with other older people. She spoke of one team member in particular who spoke in stories, recounted anecdotes and often seemed to ‘veer off the point’ in conversations as we developed the research design and discussed research findings. To understand why Joyce was recounting the particular anecdote required an attentiveness that encompassed understanding of her personal and professional history. Naming attentiveness as the starting point for care encourages recognition of the significance of this as a research competence. Understanding what this means for the conduct of research during which space and time needs to be created for such conversations to take place also involves recognising the importance of being able to embrace difference, to acknowledge disagreements and prevent discomforts becoming harmful. And it also speaks to the importance of recognising the place of research funders and commissioners in constraining or facilitating careful research. The prize in moving through the phases of research and applying the stages of caring in each is to reach a point of greater solidarity, to take what might be small steps of transformation that help repair harms, achieve transformations and contribute to justice. Our aim in this book is explore what it means to research with care. In exploring this terrain we engage with scholarship in care ethics, with work exploring knowledge generation and knowledge itself as a site of injustice, and with accounts of participatory research in practice. As Joan Tronto notes in her Foreword, this is not a book about research methods, although we do think it should be seen as a necessary contributor to courses in research methodology. Tronto’s suggestion that it offers a paradigm change for research reflects the transformatory potential of care ethics. Feminist care ethics has prompted a significant expansion in a focus on care as a vital topic of research across a range of disciplines and arenas. We hope it will help others practice with care as they research what they care about and leave a positive legacy for known and unknown others. One of the approaches we discuss in the book is inspired by Viv Bozalek’s discussion with us about more discursive practices in academia. To that effect we published a discursive review of the book in the journal Ethics and Social Welfare. It was described in the editorial – With one of the reviews of the book Researching with Care: Applying Feminist Care Ethics to Research Practice, by Tula Brannelly and Marian Barnes (2022), we’ve taken an out-of-the-ordinary approach to how relevant books are presented in this journal. The reader (reviewer) engages in a conversation with the authors of the book to elucidate the processes and the challenges of research and explore the central theme of the book–research practices with feminist ethics of care–in a ‘trialog’ and dialogical manner. Over the course of two conversations, Brannelly and Barnes work is examined in situ with Antoine Rogers, Acting Director of the Urban Scholars Programme at Brunel University, creating a discursive and conversational response to the book and its context, implications, and applications. This allows for a Cinéma verité-like opportunity for the readers to observe the dialog between the three, authors Barnes and Brannelly, and reviewer Rogers. What emerges is a master class in practice, praxis, ethics, and agency in research. The tone, tense, and timbre of these dialogs has been preserved to maintain the authenticity of the three. These two conversations provide a robust opportunity for those engaging with ethical research practice to understand some of the discourse that occurs between practitioners along with their own processes for creating, maintaining, discarding, and re-visiting ethical frameworks. The reference for this work is Marian Barnes, Tula Brannelly & Antoine J. Rogers (2023) Researching with Care – A Discursive Book Review, Ethics and Social Welfare, 17:2, 238-251, DOI: 10.1080/17496535.2023.2210343To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17496535.2023.2210343 Marian and Tula