In this series of interviews we asked reputable international care ethicists about there work, views and vision on care ethics. The interviews follow the same format of questions.
I am Hee-Kang Kim from Korea University. Here is a short piece of information on how the government of South Korea is coping with the Corona virus and its impact on care. So far, Korea has rather successfully dealt with the Corona virus. Childcare facilities and schools are now suspended, but in the rest of social lives, people are spending their normal daily lives without the need for city closures or travel bans.
1. Currently, 80 percent of Corona confirmed cases have been caused by group infection in Korea. One of major group infection cases is occurring at nursing homes (nursing hospitals). Care receivers and caregivers are both the source of infection for each other and at the same time, the most vulnerable infection targets. Therefore, the government is strengthening special prevention management for nursing hospitals and care facilities across the country. In particular, several local governments have conducted full Corona virus infection tests on ALL persons (doctors, nurses, care receivers, caregivers, and other employees) involved in ALL nursing hospitals and care facilities.
2. Korea suffers from a shortage of masks, and the state regulates the supply and demand of masks (all Koreans can purchase two public masks a week.) The Seoul city government is distributing free masks to care workers (both institutional and home-based care workers). So far, the Seoul city government has been very active in improving the treatment and support of care workers in general. For example, in Korea, children and the elderly (12 or younger, 65 or older) are given free flu vaccines. In addition, the Seoul city government has been giving free flu vaccines to care workers since two years ago.
3. Childcare facilities and schools are closed. However, in case the child cannot be cared for at home, childcare facilities and schools are currently implementing the ‘emergency care’ system: from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., lunch and snacks are served to the children on government support. My child, who is in the second grade in the elementary school, is currently using ’emergency care.’
Because of the difficulty of using childcare facilities, if a worker uses family care leave, the original unpaid family care leave can be used as paid at present on government aid.
4. In addition, the national government and some local governments plan to provide emergency living funds (or disaster basic income) or are currently under discussion.
The above are short facets of Korea’s handling of the situation. More effort will be needed in the future. Also, since this is not a matter limited to a country, international cooperation and networks seem to be more needed.
Fragile City Installation by Priscilla Stadler. Photo: Marianne Barcellona.
In the course of a few weeks, our response to COVID-19 changed the world as we knew it. Suddenly, we became potential ‘vectors’ and ‘victims’ of the virus. We are forced to make small and large-scale decisions that affect our private and public lives. Hard decisions. Most of them are steered by doing everything in our power to prevent the virus from spreading. Bodies are framed as precarious biological and social bodies. All suitable framings and decisions, but more hard choices, need to be made. Choices on how we care. How could a caring approach help us to find our way of responding to the pandemic?’(1)
Concentric circles of care To untangle and reflect upon what is happening, let us start with three concentric circles of care (2). This is an imagery: in reality, the circles intertwine, their boundaries are open. The first care circle is our intimate circle. It consists of the life-sustaining web of our family and friends, no matter if they are living in the same house, or far away. The second circle is the community that we are part of. Here, the web extends to our colleagues at work, acquaintances in our neighborhood, the cashier at our local supermarket, friends of friends, our spiritual or religious communities. The third care circle seems more distant and abstract, but is actually very nearby. It is the tapestry of all those who reside in respective countries, closely connected with the rest of the world. This circle is a national ánd global circle. In all circles, we are entangled with non-human livings, animals, gardens, rainforests, oceans, atmospheres: our ecology.
First circle: listening and responding to our needs In the first circle, care begins by connecting with ourselves, by closely listening to our bodies. Next, allying ourselves with reliable sources on our health and well-being. Organizations such as the Center for Disease Control teach us about what is happening, how it may affect our health and well-being, and what we can do. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the American immunologist who directs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and is a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, has become one of those reliable sources. So far, the media gave most attention to our physical health. We also need to care for our mental, emotional and spiritual well-being.
Next, in our immediate care circle, care is about paying attention and listening to our own needs and the needs of close ones. Remember: needs are not always clear-cut or visible. Some may not tell us what they need, either because they do not know, or they have difficulty speaking up. Pay close attention when you sense something is ‘off’ with someone that you know. Ask. Probe. Ask again. Gradually, you will know what to do, but it may take time. Especially with COVID-19, people may be fearful to admit that they have symptoms. What if they are judged or blamed? Why not do our very best to refrain from any judgment, and instead show compassion and understanding as a form of care? Here, care is also about responding to our needs and to the needs of others. By responding and by taking action, we show and take responsibility. We do something for ourselves or others. We may buy them groceries, we may bring them to the doctor, we may even advocate for them, but many times simply sitting down with someone and taking the time to listen, can be a significant act of care.
Second circle: who we are together In the second care circle, the circle of our community, we may need to revise our view on how to make the right decisions. Decisions on who needs care the most urgently, how to better protect nurses and doctors, or what should be done for the elderly or chronically ill, cannot be made from one stance only. We are connected with each other. Decisions are always culminations of who we are together.
We cannot expect that other people will take responsibility for situations that we are responsible for together. Who decides about who needs most the last pack of toilet paper? Instead of hoarding toilet paper, every one of us is called to care about the others by not buying all available goods. We need to practice solidarity. We need to trust. Share products with those who need it the most, trust that we will have enough for ourselves. There are no clear-cut ethical guidelines for us follow, the situation is too complex for general rules (but many are working hard to develop protocols) (4). We already see many stores putting a limit on products that people are allowed to buy. No more than three packages of medicine. But what if someone suffers from a chronic illness and is more vulnerable to infection than others? Should people without a chronic illness share their packages? Reaching decisions on what is the best path to follow, should take these subtle differences into consideration. Trust the pharmacist. Trust the receptionist.
Third circle: a pandemic and caring society On a national and international level we are expected to be a ‘pandemic’ citizen (3). We are called to follow regulations by being a responsible citizen. We are demanded to act in the interest of the collective. Compliance, self-mastery and self-protection align with that vital view. This view is challenging too, because people are assumed to be rational beings, capable of compliance and self-mastery. The last few weeks show that reality may be different. People are capable, and vulnerable too. They cannot fully ‘self-master’ their lives all the time and in every situation. Some of us carry particular responsibilities that conflict with these expectations. For example, the care-worker who is exhausted but who carries on because nobody else is able to stand in. Who takes care of her? Just as some citizens have gone crazy with gun violence, and just as some attempt to buy companies for exclusive rights on vaccines, we cannot predict how others will respond to the virus, nor can we predict how the virus will develop in the future. From a care perspective, we are open to learning about how to relate to this uncertainty in a meaningful way.
A care lens also invites us to acknowledge that we are caring citizens. Being a caring citizen, in line with Joan Tronto’s work on the homines curans (caring people), demands for us to see the human being as being closely interconnected with others in webs of care. Others as in other human beings, but also as in non-human others. Some of those others are more vulnerable and precarious. Yes: as a pandemic citizen, social distancing is crucial. As a caring citizen, we also search for ways to stay connected with close and distant others. To keep social distancing healthy, we need an outlook on how to support people who are living in isolation. How they can preserve and maintain their relationships, whilst complying with regulations. For many, being in isolation, at least for a while, may come with the gift of time, silence and solitude. But what if some do not experience this as a gift at all? What if our jobs are on the line? What if we miss graduation day? What if we lose that which makes us human: the experience of being close to someone or someplace we care about? Care in this third circle means expanding our response to the virus with a vision on how to protect the notions that are central to a global, caring society: solidarity, equity and trust.
Entwined solidarity This is a call for a global solidarity. A solidarity that is not restricted to us as humans, but that respects our entanglements with matter and all living creatures. An entwined solidarity that assists us in responding to what is unravelling in and around us.
(1) Care is an interdisciplinary field of research that, in addition to public health, may offer us another perspective on our personal, communal and (inter)national well being (Leget, Van Nistelrooij, Visse, 2019). (2) Emily Abel and Margaret Nelson used ‘circles of care’ in a different way in their book Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women’s Lives, 1990. (3) The pandemic citizen as a concept from critical health literature (Maunula, 2017) (4) National Academy of Medicine; https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsb2005114
Interview with Elizabeth Newnham, lecturer in Midwifery at Griffith University, Australia.
1. Where are you working at this moment?
Since January this year, I have been working as a lecturer in midwifery at Griffith University. I currently teach in the Masters in Primary Maternity Care – a postgraduate programme that implements the ‘Framework for Quality Maternal and Newborn Care’ from the Lancet series on midwifery and supports the development of maternity care leaders who can design, implement, and evaluate leading-edge primary maternity care models. Before this I was at Trinity College Dublin for two years, which was also a wonderful experience.
2. Can you tell us about your research and its relation to care ethics?
I am only at the beginning of my exploration into care ethics. During my doctoral research, which was an ethnographic study of epidural analgesia use within a hospital labour ward setting, I really started to think deeply about the idea of informed consent, an idea which is completely embedded into health care practice and based on the bioethical principle of autonomy.
What I saw in practice, in my research, and around the world within the maternity context, is that when we follow the principle of autonomy to its endpoint – when women are wanting to make decisions about their bodies, but outside of medical recommendations, then they appear neither to have autonomy nor the opportunity to give informed consent.
There are cases all over the world of women being bullied, coerced, threatened or forced into decisions about their bodies that they disagree with—this is not only unethical, it is dehumanised care. This is something I now want to explore further using a care ethical framework.
3. How did you get involved in care ethics?
As I was thinking about this problem, I came across an article by Jennifer MacLellan(( MacLellan J. 2014. Claiming an ethic of care for midwifery. Nurs Ethics, 21(7), 803–811. DOI: 10.1177/ 0969733014534878)) proposing that midwifery look to care ethics as a solution to some of these issues. This interested me, so I then read Joan Tronto’s Moral Boundaries((Tronto J. 1993. Moral boundaries: a political argument for an ethic of care. London: Routledge)) and also looked at Carol Gilligan’s In a different voice and started to explore articles on the topic. However, I was particularly drawn to the way that Tronto brought the political into care ethics.
4. How would you describe care ethics?
As a midwife who also has degree in Politics, I see care ethics as a politicised ethics. Drawing on Tronto’s care ethics argument, it is important that power relationships are made visible when we are talking about care, ethics and all things in between, such as bodily autonomy and decision-making.
There is also an emphasis on relationality—attentiveness arises between people, rather than passed from one person to another as are autonomy and consent—and on the recognition of the asymmetry of these relationships. People are not necessarily equal, especially at the time of care-giving and care-receiving, as to require care is to have some level of vulnerability.
The way that Tronto makes care central to human life is also a great shift in how we think about care. Which has traditionally been relegated to the private/female sphere, and has often been unpaid, unrecognised and undervalued, while generating wealth, goods or power has typically been hyper-valued. This is one of the most important aspects of care ethics – that care is actually central to who we are as a species and to our survival and therefore deserves attention.
5. What is the most important thing you learned from care ethics?
I am still at the early stages of learning, but I suppose at this moment the most important thing has been that the concept of autonomy, so central (and for the most part unquestioned) to my teachings in midwifery, can be unpacked to reveal assumptions about individualism, agency and equality that are not apparently obvious, and which actually recreate power relationships.
6. Whom would you consider to be your most important teacher(s) and collaborators?
I am lucky to have found several brilliant and supportive teachers/mentors over the years. But, specific to ethics, I must mention Mavis Kirkham, with whom I co-authored a recent article on care ethics(( Newnham, E., & Kirkham, M. (2019). Beyond autonomy: Care ethics for midwifery and the humanization of birth. Nursing Ethics. DOI: 10.1177/0969733018819119)).
I remember reading her work as a midwifery student – the results of an ethnographic study that demonstrated how the institution could effectively come between the midwife-mother relationship. And that really struck me. It provided an explanation, and perhaps a solution, to the discord that I was feeling in practice. It is, of course, an ethical dilemma – to be in a profession that is at its foundation woman-centred and yet midwives find themselves everyday having to support the needs of the institution over the needs of the woman.
I am also enjoying some correspondence with Inge van Nistelrooij, and some of her colleagues at the University of Humanistic Studies, Utrecht. They have extensive experience and publications in the field of care ethics, and with whom I share a common interest of care ethics in maternity. We have begun some interesting discussions and hope to work on some projects together in the future.
I look forward to collaborating with my new colleagues in the midwifery team at Griffith University. If we consider the university (and academia) as an institution with its own power relationships, Midwifery@Griffith embodies a kind of ‘care ethics’ in the practice of a collaborative collegiality that is also founded on relationality and mutual support, is student-centred, with a transformative education philosophy and commitment to improving maternity care systems in Australia.
7. What publications do you consider the most important with regard to care ethics?
Again, I am quite new to this, but I really favour Tronto’s thesis in Moral Boundaries. I have read some of Elisabeth Conradi’s work on attentiveness within institutions and the simplicity yet importance of this in practice also strikes a chord. I look forward to exploring more publications on care ethics, both seminal and emerging.
8. Which of your own books/articles/projects should we learn from?
The most obvious would be Mavis Kirkham and my recent article on the topic of care ethics in midwifery:
Newnham E & Kirkham M. 2019. Beyond autonomy: Care ethics for midwifery and the humanization of birth, Nursing Ethics. DOI: 10.1177/0969733018819119
My PhD Thesis was published as a book in 2018 by Palgrave Macmillan and is called Towards the humanisation of birth: A study of epidural analgesia and hospital birth culture. Although not about care ethics, ethical practice and informed consent do come into it. It might also be of interest to anyone looking into hospital birth culture, midwifery practice, the experience of childbirth, maternity policy or ethnography.
Articles published from this doctoral research include:
Newnham, E, McKellar, L & Pincombe, J 2017. It’s your body, but…’ Mixed messages in childbirth education: findings from a hospital ethnography, Midwifery 55: 53–59.
Newnham, E, McKellar, L & Pincombe, J 2017. Paradox of the institution: findings from a hospital labour ward ethnography, BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth 17(1): 2-11.
Newnham E, McKellar L, Pincombe J 2016. Critical Medical Anthropology in Midwifery Research: A Framework for Ethnographic Analysis, Global Qualitative Nursing Research 3: 1–6. DOI: 10.1177/2333393616675029.
Newnham E, McKellar L & Pincombe, J 2015. Documenting risk: A comparison of policy and information pamphlets for using epidural or water in labour, Women & Birth 28(3): 221-227.
Newnham E, Pincombe J & McKellar L 2013. Access or egress? Questioning the “ethics” of ethics review for an ethnographic doctoral research study in a childbirth setting, International Journal of Doctoral Studies 8: 121 – 136.
9. What are important issues for care ethics in the future?
I think care ethics, by Tronto’s definition, as ‘a species activity that includes everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible.’ (Tronto 1993, p. 103) is actually crucial to our future survival. The emphasis on care as a practice is a message that could help with numerous current global problems, the most obvious being the environment.
10. How may care ethics contribute to society as a whole, do you think?
Care ethics provides an ethical grounding for promoting social justice. It does this by inserting an understanding and recognition of power into ethical thinking, by placing increased value on relationality, by recognising vulnerability and embodiment as central principles of existence, by emphasising the need for a dialectical ethics that moves between practice and theory, and in doing all of this, exposing the falsehood that late capitalism and neoliberalism perpetuate – that the pursuit of profit and power, status or material possessions are to be valued over humanity, care and equity.
11. Do you know of any research-based projects in local communities, institutions or on national levels, where ‘care’ is central?
I think care is talked about a lot, especially in the health sector – but is not always understood in the same way by different groups. I know of no current Australian research in which care is central – but as I hope to begin work in this area I am sure I will find out if/where these may be.
12. The aim of the consortium is to further develop care ethics internationally by creating connections between people who are involved in this interdisciplinary field, both in scientific and societal realms. Do you have any recommendations for us?
No recommendations as such. I think this consortium is a really good starting point, because connection, especially between disciplines, is needed to keep ideas growing and developing. The CERC conference would be great way to create connections and new networks, and I look forward to attending one. There is something about having dedicated time and space to discuss concepts, current research and new ideas with other interested people – an embodied relationality perhaps – that can be deeply inspiring.
Elena Cologni is an artist whose research practice has had a sustained in(ter)disciplinary approach. After a BA in Fine Art from Accademia di Belle Arti Brera in Milan, and a MA in Sculpture from Bretton Hall College, Leeds University, Cologni was awarded a scholarship for a PhD in Fine Art and Philosophy from University of the Arts, Central Saint Martins College, London, 2004 (CSM).
Where are you working at the moment?
I am based in Cambridge (UK), where I had also managed for a few years the artistic research production platform Rockfluid to work internationally, and address with an in(ter)disciplinary approach issues of memory, perception and place.
I am now bringing to conclusion the project CARE: from periphery to centre commissioned for the 250th Anniversary of Homerton College, at the University of Cambridge. This included an exhibition and site-specific installation developed in response to the history of the college, through research in the archive, and in consultation with the 250 Archive Working Group, including archivist Svetlana Paterson, historian of science Dr Melanie Keene, and educationalist and social historian Dr Peter Cunningham.
Can you tell us about your research and its relation to care ethics?
The mentioned project, draws on the College architecture (Ibberson Building, 1914), and on two key figures in its history: Maud Cloudesley Brereton (formerly Maud Horobin, lecturer and Acting Principal, 1903), and Leah Manning (student 1906-08). Both of international importance, they were concerned with health, well-being, and education, and I am specifically interested in how they engaged with care in domestic (Brereton published the book ‘The Mothers’ Companion, 1909) and international political contexts (Manning organised children’s escape from the Spanish fascist regime, 1929).
A display of items from the archive gives a snapshot of early 20th-century life in a women’s College, while focusing on practices of care in society and in students’ learning, through domestic studies, teachers training in medicine, health, and physical education, academic subjects which were considered less central than others, but more ‘appropriate’ for female students.
These themes underpin my sculptural installation designed in response to the 1914 Ibberson building (a former gymnasium), and echoed in the Queen’s Wing (housing the new gym) opening to a glass veranda, flowerbeds and lawn.
Moreover, after an exchange with care ethics’ philosopher Virginia Held, I was able to contextualise my practical work, and focus on aspects of womanhood, relationally and reciprocity at the core of the approach. This process is evidenced throughout the exhibition, including the recorded development of my thinking in a Moleskine sketchbook, and a selection of extracts from one of the publications Held shared with me informed a series of custom-made fabric labels, the steel frieze construction (Care As Support), and the steel and rope made sculptures (Relations Of Care).
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How did you get involved in care ethics?
In the current project care ethics functions as the lens through which I responded to the College archive, but I have been working in this direction even if I did not addressing it directly for some time. It naturally evolved from understanding the dialogic approach in my artistic process as a reciprocal form of caring (from the part of myself as the artist, and that of the participant), while building on educationalist, sociologist and poet Danilo Dolci, who theorised and adopted Reciprocal Maieutics (1973).
Learning about his work and talking to people who were close to him, allowed me to become aware of the impact of the reciprocal giving process involved (Cologni 2016), also typical in ecological and feminist approaches. This experience still is at the core of my creative thinking and it was embedded at the time in a series of dialogic sculptures for hands (Lo Scarto).
More recently the project Seeds of Attachment (2016/18), a specific feminist lens (discussed at New Hall Art Collection in Cambridge and Freud Museum in London), allowed me to focus on undervalued roles of care in society, as I worked with region based participants, and in particular on motherhood in collaboration with the Centre for family Research in Cambridge. This had been previously addressed through the project ‘U Verruzze’ (2013), looking at trust between mother and child and curated by Vessel.
However, in the latest work, the emphasis is on the caring role of motherhood in society in a wider sense. This, similarly to other practices of care in society, is undervalued, even if hugely contributing to our economies and welfare. The project tried to identify intersections between the theory of attachment of parent and child and place attachment, by proposing encounters on the school-run (the route from home to school), thus highlighting a sort of geography of difference of caring. This was done by using a dialogic sculpture to create a physical and conceptual new place for the encounter to happen: the intraplace.
“Learning to take care also means to foster and create new connections to solve problems in society.”
ELENA cOLOGNI
How would you describe care ethics?
Care ethics allows us to step out of the dominant social, political and cultural system of understanding society and relations, and look at the peripheral (not the central) instead: the circular (not the linear) thinking, the quiet (not the loud) voices in society as strengths (not weaknesses). Care Ethics teaches and trains us not to get tempted to compete by adopting the same strategies, which have damaged our society and environment, but try different avenues instead.
Learning to take care also means to foster and create new connections to solve problems in society, something at the core of some non-western countries’ ethos (eg. Ubuntu). Essentially care ethics has listening at its core, as much as most dialogic approaches including Dolci’s, and a lot can come from practicing it.
What is the most important thing you learned from care ethics?
As an artist and academic, I have referred to phenomenology the most since early on (1999-2004), while also understanding the participants’ and audience’s reception of my work through aspects of psychology, and considering lived experience as central to my work. Care ethics showed me how to position my subjectivity, within this tradition.
Virginia Held for example states that “Experience is central to feminist thought, but what is meant by experience is not mere empirical observation, as so much of the history of modern philosophy and as analytic philosophy tend to construe it. Feminist experience is what art and literature as well as science deal with. It is the lived experience of feeling as well as thinking, of performing actions as well as receiving impressions, and of being aware of our connections with other persons as well as of our own sensations.” (2006)
Whom would you consider to be your most important teacher(s) and collaborators?
My interest in how care can be embedded in art evolved from considering its perceptual and psychological component since my early studies in Italy, which led to include specific strategies for enhancing social awareness and engagement. This was inspired by artists from the 60s and 70s, whose approaches impact society to this day in different ways. These are, including: the psychology informed approaches by Bruce Nauman, and Grazia Varisco (Varisco taught me at Brera Academy in Milan); the sociology related one by Dan Graham; the active participation and empathy in Lydia Clark’s, and the social actions and positioning by Artists Placement Group (APG) and Steven Willats.
In addition, I partially owe my unconventional research journey to experimental film maker and great mind Malcolm Le Grice, who was the director of studies of my PhD at Central Saint Martins in London from 1998. Generally, in my projects, my collaborators are carefully chosen and approached to take part in the initial investigation and research and/or in aspects of the creative process as participants.
What publications do you consider the most important with regard to care ethics?
I can mention the references which are useful for me to consider a very small portion of this wide area of study, and specifically to do with care in relation to women’s position in society, dialogic strategies and ecology. I would mention Nel Noddings’ developed idea of care as a feminine ethic, drawing conceptually from a maternal perspective (Caring: A Feminine Approach To Ethics And Moral Education, Berkeley: University Of California Press, 1986), and understanding caring relationships to be basic to human existence and consciousness. Also, Annette Baier underscores trust, as a basic relation between particular persons, and as the fundamental concept of morality (Trust and Anti-trust, Ethics 96: 231-60, 1986).
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Virginia Held wrote numerous publications on care ethics, in which she construes care as the most basic moral value, and describes feminist ethics as committed to actual experience, and lived methodologies. One of the most recent books is Ethics of Care, Personal Political and Global (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006). Held argues that rights based moral theories presume a background of social connection, and that care ethics can help to create communities that promote healthy social relations. In this context, I argue that art can be a powerful dialogic tool.
Which of your own books/articles/projects should we learn from?
My artistic approach has developed through steps of a personal journey, each of which investigates different aspects of the same unsettled condition of a human being in search for home. However, in the body of work since 2014 the subject matter has become more specific and so has my awareness of the impact of my participatory strategies.
For example, the project Lo scarto, a workshop based project also including 40 sculptures for hand and drawings, developed in Sicily, where Danilo Dolci worked, a process of visualization of the role of listening in dialogue (Unesco and European Funding, 2015), allowed for a non-verbal dialogic strategy to emerge therein. This is discussed in the book chapter Cologni, E. (2016) ‘A Dialogic Approach For The Artist As An Interface In An Intercultural Society’. In Burnard, Mackinlay, Powell, The Routledge International Handbook of Intercultural Arts Research New York, London: ROUTLEDGE.
While the site responsive art project Lived Dialectics, Movement and Rest at Museums Quartier in Vienna, was informed by walks (sic) and research on place attachment in dialogue with US based environmental psychologist David Seamon (discussed at the Leonardo Laser series of talks at Central Saint Martins College University of the Arts London and Westminster University, in 2016, and the Leonardo 50th Conference, 2017, Bologna, Italy, published as Cologni, E. (2018) ‘LOCATING ONESELF’, in The New and History – art*science 2017/Leonardo 50 Proceedings. Capucci and Cipolletta (Eds), Noema Media and Publishing – ISBN 978-88-909189-7-1). This project informed the development of Seeds of Attachment, which, together with my ongoing relevant research will be included in a book.
What are important issues for care ethics in the future?
My interest is now in a possible link between ecofeminism and care ethics (Held) through practices of care. I am trying to embed the adoption of dialogic (inherently interdisciplinary) strategies in the creation of the work, a form of socially engage art practice. These include responding to the spatial (Linda McDowell), social (Henry Lefebvre), and cultural dimension of a place, as well as engaging with specific communities and collaborators therein to create situated (Donna Haraway) and embodied knowledge (Luce Irigaray). My projects often develop through collaborating, and thus becoming part, of interdisciplinary contexts.
For example, the current project was developed in collaboration with the College 250 Archive Working Group and involved subjects like science, education and architecture. However, in my practice, consistent concerns with ecofeminism and place are informed by ongoing conversations with Professor Susan Buckingham (feminist geographer, Cambridge, UK), whereas the artistic strategies with curator Gabi Scardi (Milan, Italy, International Development Fund British Council/Arts Council England, 2018/19), and in reference to historical artists like Mierle Laderman Ukeles (Maintenance Art Works 1969–1980).
How may care ethics contribute to society as a whole, do you think?
I am interested in the fact that it takes us to look at things from a different angle, consider our actions and experience, to then realize how we can contribute to society. More specifically sharing through art, strategies and concerns I have as a mother myself was quite natural, and this will hopefully lead to make people more aware of how they can contribute themselves to society in the everyday. Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher have defined ‘‘taking care of’’ as an activity that includes ‘‘everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (1990), and this is so relevant now and must be implemented at a social and environmental levels.
Do you know of any research-based projects in local communities, institutions or on national levels, where ‘care’ is central?
I have been in touch with different contexts relevant to my art work and research in the UK and beyond, including conducting ongoing dialogue with Ecofeminist Laura Cima (Italy, see my A-N Bursary blog 2018), and the Moleskine Foundation, whose social and pedagogic work through art takes place internationally including Africa. I am always interested in gathering more information about associations and organisations specifically in the context of artistic practice and care, and these include for example: the research centres CAMeO, at the University of Leicester (UK), or the projects Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology (Denmark), and Pier Projects (UK).
However, there are many wonderful socially engaged projects, institutions, artists and curators I have been following out there, whose remit is to impact society, and whose approach resonates with care ethics, even if in a wider sense, in terms of supporting social cohesion, denouncing and acting on climate change, address geopolitical issues, support inclusive gender policies, and intercultural dialogue. These are, including: VISIBLE Project (Belgium/Italy), Museum MIMA (UK), Arte Útil by artist Tania Bruguera, curatorial platforms PUBLICS (Finland), Arts Catalyst (UK), Vessel, and Connecting Cultures (Italy), to mention just a few.
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Maud Cloudesley Brereton, The Mother’s Companion (1909), detail from Contents page. Published when Brereton was a mother of five children. She had been honoured by the French Academy for her work in promoting public health. Sir Lauder Brunton, a leading medical practitioner with an international reputation, and a founder of the National League for Physical Education contributed a Preface. Published by Mills and Boon, best known for their popular literature and practical handbooks.
Display of selected items from the College archive on Maud Brereton and Leah Manning.
Indoor Gymnastics (1944/5). Photograph of scenes from Homerton’s past, showing students participating in gymnastics classes. Learning about health and moving the body was an important part of historical curricula.
Installation view in the Ibberson Gymnasium, Homerton College, University of Cambridge. The arrangement of the display was inspired by archival photographs of the room, whose architectural design was punctuated by wooden panels corresponding to the areas in between the curved windows. On view are reproductions of the original items kept in the College Archive, as well as selected sport equipment. The newly produced rope sculptures refer back to the time when the space was used as a gym since it was built in 1914.
Relations of Care, Elena Cologni (2018, pair of mobile sculptures, steel rods, jute ropes, 2.5 x 2.5 x 2 metres each).
Care Proximities, Elena Cologni, installation view in front of the Ibberson Building, Homerton College, University of Cambridge (2018, installation including two sculptures and drawing on college lawn: wood + lawn marking paint, 20x100x0.5 meters)
Care Proximities, Elena Cologni, installation view in the college lawn.
Installation view including: Mother’s Tools, Elena Cologni (2018, 1 in a composition of 4: wood, steel, custom-made fabric labels, printing tools from the artist’s mother’s embroidery kit, 20cmx20cm each); and Care Notes, Elena Cologni (2018, graphite prints, graphite pencil, laser print on paper, Moleskine Japanese album, with inserts of fabric designs from the Architectural Review Magazine, June 1936, 21cm x 120 cm).
Mother’s Tools, detail from installation
Portion of display with content from the College archive, including contents of a needlework box (1861-2). Bought for 12s 6d, this box belonged to Emma Hunter, a student at Homerton College in the early 1860s. Dressmaking was an important skill for students in their adult lives, and in preparing a younger generation of girls at school for home-making and motherhood.
Care Is Relational, and Care Instructions, Elena Cologni (2018, 2 from series of woven labels, the first of which is inspired by Virginia Held’s writings, and the latter by Maud Brereton’s revolutionary position at the time, that domestic labour should be paid) Copyright Ó Elena Cologni, Homerton College, University of Cambridge and Moleskine Foundation
Selected References
Cologni, E. (2016) Dialogic Approach For The Artist As An Interface In An Intercultural Society. In Burnard, Mackinlay, Powell, The Routledge International Handbook of Intercultural Arts Research New York, London: Routledge.
Cologni, E. (2018) Locating oneself, in The New and History – art*science 2017/Leonardo 50 Proceedings. Capucci and Copolletta (Eds), Noema Media and Publishing (ISBN 978-88-909189-7-1)
Held, V. (2006) Justice and Care: Essential Readings in Feminist Ethics Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 101-115.
Held, V. (1993) Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Held, V. (2006) Ethics of Care, Personal Political and Global. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Held, V. (2018) Care Ethics and the Social Contract, unpublished lecture, Oxford.
Noddings, N. (1982) Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley: University of CA Press.
Fisher, B. and Joan C. Tronto (1990). Toward a Feminist Theory of Care. In Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women’s Lives, edited by Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson. State University of New York Press.
Tronto, J. (1994) Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York, NY: Routledge.
Acknowledgements
The discussed project ‘CARE: from periphery to centre‘ was developed with contributions from University College London Library; Cambridge University Library; The Harlow Art Trust: Gibberd Gallery, Harlow. The project was part of Cambridge Festival of Ideas 2018, was commissioned by Homerton College of the University of Cambridge for the 250th Anniversary Celebrations, and kindly supported by the Moleskine Foundation. www.elenacologni.com
Copyright Elena Cologni, Homerton College, University of Cambridge and Moleskine Foundation
2. Can you tell us about your research and its relation to care ethics?
My focus is on the social organization of care and its impact on women and democracy. Gender inequalities are connected to women`s poor access to fundamental resources, such as time and income. I am interested in developing theoretical analysis on care and democracy, empirically informed by Brazilian and Latin-American contexts.
I also develop empirical research on conservative reactions to gender and women’s rights in Brazil and Latin America, which have at least two fronts: direct attacks against “gender perspective” in Law and Public Policy; deconstruction of legal guarantees for work and the social security system. In both cases, the “defense of the family” has been key to conservative public discourse, while gendered aspects of work are not being considered and the effective possibilities for care and gender equality are being dismantled.
Poor and black women are the most affected. There is a racial component in the social organization of care in Brazil, thus the importance of intersectional approaches.
3. How did you get involved in care ethics?
My researches on gender, politics and democracy have been first focused on women’s under-representation in Brazilian institutional politics, in formal arenas of political representation. Developing empirical analysis about women and politics in Brazil from 2003, I started my dialogue with authors and approaches in Political Feminist Theories, focusing on social barriers for individual and collective autonomy. Issues concerning the voicing of women’s experiences and their social position, as well as the social organization of care, became inescapable in my analysis.
4. How would you describe care ethics?
A human and relational perspective on politics and everyday life, leading to alternative conceptions of justice within the frame of democratic critique. An alternative to the logic of commodification.[pullquote]Caring relationships are part of people’s daily lives and a factor generating inequalities in democracies.[/pullquote]
5. What is the most important thing you learned from care ethics?
A theoretical and methodological perspective informed by women’s experiences and social position.
6. What publications do you consider the most important with regard to care ethics?
I will mention some of the authors from which I have learned and still learn: Carol Gilligan, Joan Tronto, Helena Hirata, Pascale Molinier, Patricia Hill-Collins. I agree and identify with care theories and approaches concerned about privileges and inequalities, focused on the connections between every day experiences, the social organization of care, and democracy.
7. Which of your own books/articles/projects should we learn from?
I would highlight my books on feminist theory and autonomy, such as Autonomia e desigualdades de gênero (Eduff, 2013) and Feminismo e Política (Boitempo, 2014, with Luis Felipe Miguel), and on changes in family structure and organization in Brazil, Família: novos conceitos (Perseu Abramo, 2014). I would also mention two recent articles: The Sexual Division of Labor and Democracy (2016) and another on care, justice, and democracy: Responsibilities, care and democracy (2015). Most of my work has been published in Portuguese.
9. What are important issues for care ethics in the future?
The crisis of care and the contradictions between capitalism and care, as Nancy Fraser has put it in recent texts and interviews.
10. How may care ethics contribute to society as a whole, do you think?
Developing analysis of the significance of care in everyday life in different national and social contexts and the effects of different social organization patterns of care on people’s lives and democracy. Amplifying the understanding of care as social critique and social ethics, offering alternatives to the commodification of life.
11. Do you know of any research-based projects in local communities, institutions or on national levels, where ‘care’ is central? Please describe.
Recent projects brought together Brazilian and French sociologists. In Brazil, University of São Paulo and Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia para Estudos da Metrópole (INCT-CEM) organized an event on care and care workers in 2010, that produced a book. Later, a project on gender and work in Brazil and France also produced an event and a book has recently been published.
In Brazil, there are current researches on care in bioethics, psychology, collective health. President Dilma Rousseff was deposed. The area of Political Science in Brazil is poor in studies and reflections on care. As one of the editors of Revista Brasileira de Ciência Política from 2008 and 2016, I organized a thematic issue on Care in 2015, but it is still an exotic theme for political scientists in Brazil.
12. The aim of the consortium is to further develop care ethics internationally by creating connections between people who are involved in this interdisciplinary field, both in scientific and societal realms. Do you have any recommendations or wishes yourself?
I wish the consortium could help us to build productive collaboration and develop theoretical and empirical researches facing the challenges for a politics of care (a caring democracy, to quote Joan Tronto), for a social ethics of care, in the actual stage of capitalism. Care and gender equality are being affected in different manners, in different parts of the world. I think comparative research and collective efforts to develop theories well informed by diverse experiences and social data are more than welcome and necessary.
Interview with Eleonor Faur, IDAES-National University of San Martín, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
1. Where are you working at this moment?
I am a Professor at the Institute for Higher Studies on Social Sciences, National University of San Martín. Buenos Aires, Argentina. I teach graduated courses on Gender and Care Policies, and on Gender Relations and Welfare in Latin America.
2. Can you tell us about your research and its relation to care ethics?
My PhD focused on Childcare Policies and Gender Inequalities in Argentina. In addition, I participated in a Global UNRISD Project called “The Political and Social Economy of Care”, and I developed some qualitative, quantitative and institutional research on care relations, gender and social inequalities. The key argument I developed was that Argentina’s social policies themselves are reproducing gender inequalities (assigning the care workload mainly to women) and class inequalities among families (by making different kinds, and qualities, of care services available targeted at different social groups, instead of promoting genuinely ‘equal rights’ for all of them) (Faur, 2009, 2011, 2014).
For this reason, I refer to these arrangements in terms of a political and social organization of care, one which is constantly developing through the interventions of public and private offerings, and which has different shapes and outcomes across social class.
Although I did not explicitly analyze care and social policies arrangements from a `care ethics approach`, my interest on how much inequality are societies capable to support deserves further exploration from an ethical perspective, which I shall be doing in the future.
Lastly, I began to think about grass-root women’s activism in response to gender violence and feminicides as a development of a “popular care ethics”. That is, an ethics that is constructed through collective action in the public sphere, recreating feminist practice as a way to take care of the youngest and their rights. (See Revista Anfibia).
3. How did you get involved in care ethics?
I got involved in care ethics due to my work on gender and human rights issues.
3. How would you describe care ethics?
Care ethics is about interdependency and empathy as dispositions to giving and receiving attention, affection, and support. It is also about getting basic need satisfied. Care ethics may be considered also as a paradigm shift in the study of welfare.
4. What is the most important thing you learned from care ethics?
The most important think I learned from care ethics was to shape a philosophical approach to analyze daily social relations and public policies, from a human dimension.
5. Whom would you consider to be your most important teacher(s) and collaborators?
My closer teachers were Elizabeth Jelin, Rosalía Cortés and Shahra Razavi. My colleagues Luz Gabriela Arango and Valeria Esquivel. And many authors that I read.
6. What publications do you consider the most important with regard to care ethics?
Joan Tronto’s Moral Boundaries and Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice, are the most important to me, as a breakthrough in this concept.
7. Which of your own books/articles/projects should we learn from?
My book: El cuidado infantil en el siglo XXI. Mujeres malabaristas en una sociedad desigual. (2014) (Childcare in 21st.Century. Juggler Women in an Inequal Society.)
My article “A Widening Gap? The Political and Social Economy of Care”, in Development & Change (2011).
8. What are important issues for care ethics in the future?
First, it shall be important to reinforce the analysis on national and socioeconomical contexts in care relations, maybe through the development of comparative studies. Second, to identify how care develops in different scales and spheres. Third, to legitimize as a special “lens” to analyze, design and evaluate public policies.
9. How may care ethics contribute to society as a whole, do you think?
I think that care ethics may contribute in at least three ways. On the one hand, it is key to reinforce social bond and empathy on an equality basis. On the other, it could be considered as a lens to the design of public policies and thus contribute to reach the poorest population. Lastly, it may contribute by making economy sustainable. All of them are key to produce and maintain welfare.
10. Do you know of any research-based projects in local communities, institutions or on national levels, where ‘care’ is central? Please describe.
In Latin America, Uruguay has developed a National Integrated System on Care, which is considered as a pillar of social protection. Chile and Colombia are also working on this direction. Local communities in Argentina are more and more interested in care issues and developing programmes aimed to child and aging population care services, which are dramatically insufficient for the time being.
11. The aim of the consortium is to further develop care ethics internationally by creating connections between people who are involved in this interdisciplinary field, both in scientific and societal realms. Do you have any recommendations or wishes yourself?
I hope we can come out with an agenda for this consortium, that includes interregional research collaborations and projects to expand this approach internationally.
Interview with Merel Visse, PhD, associate professor, University of Humanistic Studies, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
1. Where are you working at this moment?
Currently I work as an associate professor Care Ethics and Policy at the University of Humanistic Studies in The Netherlands. As a scholar and artist, I combine theoretical and practice-based work to inquire about the moral good in care. In addition to regular scientific output such as publications, I also make installations, objects, drawings, paintings, projects and communities.
I have received a grant of my university and for the next three years I will focus on the meaning of creative and artistic practice for understanding the moral good in care. I prefer to work in close collaboration with scientific and civic partners, like health care and policy institutions and local governments, so my work is always the outcome of a relational process. I also teach several courses for graduate students, such as care ethical qualitative inquiry, narrative inquiry and responsive evaluation.
On my website www.merelvisse.com you can find an overview of my work, activities and inspirations.
2. Can you tell us about your research and its relation to care ethics?
Our view of care ethics is dialectical: we understand and foster good care by dialectically exploring care through both theoretical and empirical, practice-based, lenses (Leget, Van Nistelrooij & Visse, 2017)((Leget, C., Van Nistelrooij, I., & Visse, M. (2017). Beyond demarcation: Care ethics as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry. Nursing ethics, doi: 10.1177/0969733017707008.)). Originally, I began my work in care as an evaluator and qualitative researcher, but I’ve always had a strong focus on theory as well. During the last four years, we have developed a care ethical qualitative inquiry approach that is ‘fed’ by theories and practices of phenomenology, relational ethnography and responsive evaluation approaches. These are approaches that support us in understanding people’s singular and collective experiences with care.
But while working with these approaches, we felt a strong need for a different epistemology and method to enhance our understandings. It’s also due to a new ‘critical turn’ in qualitative inquiry that includes attention for the sensory and affective dimensions of care, and more. The process of drawing or working with photo voice and making artistic objects can be seen as a mode of inquiry. Looking at visual data, and producing visual data help us know differently than knowing through verbalized accounts.
So how to study care by the inclusion of attention for affective, sensory, embodied dimensions of life? I believe this is necessary, because as many care ethicists have emphasized, care is not a virtue, but a practice. And therefore we can only theorize and think ‘care’ by approaches that are congruent with a practice-view.
3. How did you get involved in care ethics?
After the publication of my book and PhD thesis, ‘Openings for Humanization in Modern Health Care Practices’((Visse, M. A. (2012). Openings for humanization in modern health care practices)) in 2012, I received a phone call from professor Frans Vosman. He read my work and invited me to join the Care Ethics group in Utrecht. It was the start of a path that has deepened my work and view on care ethics profoundly.
Originally, I was trained by professors Tineke Abma and Guy Widdershoven of the VU University of Amsterdam, Medical Humanities, who introduced me to the fields of responsive evaluation, qualitative inquiry, practice-based work and Gadamerian hermeneutics and empirical ethics. I was introduced to evaluation scholars like Bob Stake, Thomas Schwandt and Jennifer Greene with whom I’ve just developed a special Volume on Evaluation for a Caring Society (in press, to be published by IAP publishers this fall).
In my book from 2012, among other topics, I discussed the meaning of the work of Margaret Urban Walker in the light of several empirical (phenomenological) studies on how caregivers and care–receivers experienced good care. The book consists of published papers that – each in its own way and each based on empirical studies – were built upon the collaborative-expressive model of Walker. Professor Andries Baart, my former colleague, introduced me to a care ethical view on qualitative inquiry. That opened up a whole new way of thinking about ‘practising care ethics’.
4. How would you describe care ethics?
My father is in cultural heritage and as a child, I remember him closely looking at buildings. I learned that the material world embodies many traditions and stories. I remember him telling me about different kinds of mortar in between the bricks and how the mortar (which is tiny and detailed) strongly influenced the outlook of the whole. That is what care does, the performative dimension of care: just like mortar, it is in ‘liminal’ space, holding people together (or not) in ‘life sustaining webs’, to use Fisher’s and Tronto’s words. In addition, I saw my father negotiating with owners, engineers, restaurateurs and representatives of local governments. All these people had different stakes when living in and preserving the built environment. In hindsight I know that this is where my training in responsive evaluation (which is all about negotiation and dialogue) and later on, in care ethics began.
It’s a little bit of a long introduction to show you how my view on care ethics has grown. I see care ethics as a way of knowing and inquiring about what is ‘good’ in historical, aesthetical, temporal and spatial ways. Care ethics is an epistemology that is featured by hermeneutical understanding, listening and experiencing the world around us, together with others. It is about the moral dimensions of living in (and on) our own tapestry of people and relationships. Care ethics – as described in Leget, Van Nistelrooij & Visse (2017) – asks about the normative in a dialectical way: honoring both theory and practice.
A practice view on care acknowledges that people and their lives are part of an intrinsic and complex tapestry that critically counter-thinks notions like agency, (self) management and control. Care ethics acknowledges the ambiguity and complexity of everyday situations in care: that is what matters to me profoundly. People ‘undergo’ and ‘accept’ being in certain kinds of positions (e.g. of a caregiver and –receiver). Care ethics is, as my colleague Alistair Niemeijer so aptly phrased it, ‘inherently dialectic’. The dialectic nature of care ethics has been developed by our chair Carlo Leget in his publication on the re-examination on the empirical and the normative (Leget, Borry, De Vries, 2009)((Leget, C., Borry, P., de Vries, R. (2009). ‘Nobody tosses a dwarf!’ The relation between the empirical and the normative reexamined. Bioethics. 2009 May;23(4):226-35. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8519.2009.01711.x.)). By keeping theory and practice ‘in tension’, care ethics can be further developed and understood.
5. Whom would you consider to be your most important teacher(s) and collaborators?
Currently, my most important teachers are outside the field of care ethics, if I may speak of an “in- and outside”. For example, I especially admire the work of the philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer and more recently, the French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion. I prefer to work ‘slow’: I learn through careful, slow reading and reflection.
Currently, my most important collaborators and teachers are my colleagues and (former) students of the Care Ethics group. We carry out research in collaboration with several Dutch cities and health care institutions and this work ‘in the mud’ humbles me and shows me new perspectives and challenges. Every project is run by a core team of researchers who I feel privileged to collaborate with.
Co-authoring papers with colleagues is very rewarding. I have written papers with colleagues, such as Alistair Niemeijer, Inge van Nistelrooij and Carlo Leget. With Tineke Abma, I have just developed a special Volume on Evaluation for a Caring Society. Several care ethicists contributed to that Volume, like Helen Kohlen, Karin Dahlberg, Maurice Hamington and Jeannette Pols, as well as several responsive evaluators like Melissa Freeman, Anders Hanberger, Gustaaf Bos, Hannah Leyerzapf and others.
I have always found myself on the intersection of several disciplines and I believe this is vital for the quality of my work. Now, while developing this Consortium, I discovered that there are so many people from a wide range of fields who contribute to care ethics and theory. I look forward to meeting them very much.
6. What publications do you consider the most important with regard to care ethics?
Eva Feder Kittay’s Love Labor
Joan Tronto’s Caring Democracy
Epistemology:
Margaret Urban Walker’s Moral Understandings
Richard Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and relativism. Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis.
And with regards to our dialectical view between they and empirical work:
Johnson & Parry’s Qualitative Research for Social Justice.
7. Which of your own books/articles/projects should we learn from?
This depends on your own background and interests. Soon, the special volume on Evaluation for a Caring Society will be published (fall 2017, IAP publishers). In the past, I have published about different topics, mostly related to how to ‘operationalise’ care ethics as a political ethic. On my website, you can find an overview for my publications and projects. Please email me when you would like to receive one of my papers, I’d be happy to share them.
8. What are important issues for care ethics in the future?
I see many opportunities to increase the socio-political impact of care ethics. To do so, we need to build bridges between care ethicists who are conceptually oriented and care ethicists who mainly do empirical work, both empirical research and policy design and programs. By collaboration, we can create synergy. The new Care Ethics Research Consortium will be a platform for that.
I also believe in creativity. That is the topic I’m currently focusing on: creativity in the moral domain.
9. Do you know of any research-based projects in local communities, institutions or on national levels, where ‘care’ is central? Please describe
Yes: there are so many! Our research group carries out a rich variety of practice-based care ethical projects in close collaboration with several Dutch cities, residential elderly care institutions, hospitals, for-profit organisations (like a pharmacy) and communities. Most of these projects result in peer-reviewed publications as well. One example is a large Dutch elderly care organization that aims to work according to relation centered care. We facilitated an action-research project, based on a care ethical stance, to guide participants towards new understandings on relation centered care.
10. The aim of the consortium is to further develop care ethics internationally by creating connections between people who are involved in this interdisciplinary field, both in scientific and societal realms. Do you have any recommendations for us?
I would especially like to build bridges between conceptually and empirically oriented care ethicists, to develop international research grant proposals together. I believe that by increasing our practice based work, we will put care ethics more centrally on the societal agenda.
Interview with Elena Pulcini, Department of Political and Social Sciences (DSPS), University of Florence, Italy.
1. Where are you working at this moment?
I am a full professor of Social philosophy at the Florence University, DSPS. I teach at the Department of Philosophy in Florence.
2. Can you tell us about your research and its relation to care ethics?
The starting point for my main research path is a critique of modern individualism (the figure of homo oeconomicus) from two fundamental perspectives: the role of the passions in forming the subject and social bond, and the idea of difference (see my The Individual without Passions((Pulcini, E. (2012). The individual without passions: modern individualism and the loss of the social bond (K. Whittle, Trans.). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.)) ). Owing to its attention to both these aspects, the ethics of care immediately struck me as very promising, not just because of its critical approach to the dominant liberal model, but also because it allows us to think normatively of a different idea of subject. Subsequently, and above all, the ethics of care has given me a precious viewpoint from which to put forward a philosophy of the global age (see my Care of the World((Pulcini, E. (2013). Care of the world: fear, responsibility and justice in the global age (K. Whittle, Trans.). Dordrecht: Springer.)) ).
3. How did you get involved in care ethics?
I discovered the ethics of care years ago on reading the text by Gilligan, In a Different Voice, which over a long period I also discussed in feminist and university groups. I found points of contact with two theoretical perspectives that were already present in my reflection: the feminist theory of difference (very widespread in Italy), and gift theory, inspired by Marcel Mauss.
4. How would you describe care ethics?
I consider very convincing the vision that describes care theories, despite their differences, as a contextual ethics based on the importance of relationships and interdependence, attentive to the everyday and at the same time capable of affecting the social and political dimension. And, above all, I appreciate the idea of an ethics based on sentiments and emotions.
However, I think that this last point needs looking into further: understanding which emotions and feelings are at the basis of a caring attitude in my opinion enables us to free care from the risk of an altruistic and sentimentalist vision and to better define the idea of a “good” care. It is on this aspect that my present research concentrates.
5. What is the most important thing you learned from care ethics?
The fact that people do not just act on the basis of interest or rational calculation, but also on affections, empathy and the consciousness of relationships. A fact that is now also confirmed by neuroscience. In this sense I have found further confirmation of what I had already learnt from gift theory and its radical critique of utilitarian individualism.
However, in the ethics of care, there is an aspect that I consider particularly important: the accent that it places, in some of its expressions in particular (e.g. Kittay), on the human being’s constitutive vulnerability and people’s reciprocal dependence on each other.
6. Whom would you consider to be your most important teacher(s) and collaborators?
For the critique of modernity, the Frankfurt School. For the critique of the modern subject, I would like to cite feminism (especially the theory of difference), French deconstructionism (Derrida, Foucault), and the Collège de Sociologie (Bataille, Blanchot). The concept of care is not very present in philosophy, but it is possible to find some points of contact, as well as in Heidegger, also in authors who have greatly inspired my research path, such as Anders, Arendt, Lévinas, Jonas, Nancy, the communitarians (Taylor), and Mauss and the gift theorists (Caillé, Godbout); and last but not least the ethics of sympathy (Hume, Smith, Scheler etc.).
7. What publications do you consider the most important with regard to care ethics?
The works by Carol Gilligan, Joan Tronto, Eva Kittay, Virginia Held, Michael Slote, Sandra Laugier and Fiona Robinson.
8. Which of your own books/articles/projects should we learn from?
Care of the World. Fear, Responsibility and Justice in the Global Age (2013)((Pulcini, E. (2013). Care of the world: fear, responsibility and justice in the global age (K. Whittle, Trans.). Dordrecht: Springer.))
Donner le care (2012)((E. Pulcini (2012). Donner le care. Revue du Mauss Semestrielle, vol. 39, pp. 49-66, ISSN: 1247-4819, EN vers. Giving the care.))
Per una filosofia della cura, in ‘La società degli individui’ (2010)((E. Pulcini (2010). Per una filosofia della cura. La società degli individui, vol. 38, pp. 9-19. Angeli. ISSN: 1590-7031.))
Care et convivialisme. Un commentaire du Manifeste convivialiste (2014)((Pulcini, E. (2014). Care et convivialisme. Un commentaire du Manifeste convivialiste. Revue du Mauss, 43,(1), 41-43. doi: 10.3917/rdm.043.0041.))
Quelques questions sur le convivialisme (2014)((Pulcini, E. (2014). Quelques questions sur le convivialisme. Revue du Mauss, 43,(1), 253-257. doi: 10.3917/rdm.043.0253.))
What Emotions motivate care?, in ‘Emotions Review’ (2016)((Pulcini, E. (2016) What Emotions Motivate Care? Emotion Review. Volume:9, issue:1, pages: 64-71. doi: 10.1177/1754073915615429.))
Between Vulnerability and Contamination. Rethinking the Self in the Global Age (2016), in ‘Genero y Direito’, Centro de Ciências Jurídicas – Univ. Federal da Paraíba.((Pulcini, E. (2016). Between Vulnerability and Contamination. Rethinking the Self in the Global Age. Genero y Direito. V. 5, no. 03. doi: 10.18351/2179-7137/ged.v5n3p30-48. ))
Cura ed emozioni (2017); co-editor with Sophie Bourgault. Bologna: Il Mulino 2017 (forthcoming)
9. What are important issues for care ethics in the future?
I believe it is important to stress, as I hinted above, the research in the neurosciences, as well as the rediscovery of empathy (from Edith Stein and Max Scheler to Jeremy Rifkin), in order to consolidate the paradigm of care in its universalistic potentialities. I consider it fundamental not just to extend this paradigm to both sexes, and to the social and political dimension (as many care theorists already do), but also to show how it can bear fruits in proposing an ethic for the global age (an ethic for the environment and future generations).
I think that the idea of care is not just decisive in order to show the partiality of the liberal and mainstream paradigm of justice, but also to integrate and enrich the concept of responsibility (which I try to do in my book Care of the World): with respect to the abstract principle of responsibility, care introduces the fundamental dimension of concrete commitment, work and practice
10. How may care ethics contribute to society as a whole, do you think?
I think that care should become a way of life, a way of dealing with all the aspects of life, from the private to the social to the political. Against the pathologies of the contemporary age (individualism, narcissism, indifference, violence) care is a revolutionary word that can transform our vision of the world, and our relationships with each other, as well as with nature and the environment.
11. Do you know of any research-based projects in local communities, institutions or on national levels, where ‘care’ is central? Please describe.
As a philosopher I am not very familiar with practical projects and initiatives based on care in Italy. Nevertheless, on several occasions I have been able to collaborate with various initiatives (local associations, training courses, volunteer communities) that seem to testify to a growing interest and liveliness in this perspective at a practical level too.
12. The aim of the consortium is to further develop care ethics internationally by creating connections between people who are involved in this interdisciplinary field, both in scientific and societal realms. Do you have any recommendations or wishes yourself?
I think that it is an invaluable initiative to spread the ethics of care, and that the consortium can be very useful in this endeavour. I would like to add that, even though some fundamental texts on this topic have been translated into Italian and recently the attention of Italian scholars has grown, in Italy the ethics of care has not yet been paid the attention that it deserves. I hope that the CERC will make a significant contribution to this.
Interview with Inge van Nistelrooij PhD, assistant professor Care Ethics, University of Humanistic Studies, Utrecht, The Netherlands
1. Where are you working at this moment?
I am an assistant professor of Care Ethics at the University of Humanistic Studies, Utrecht, The Netherlands. As far as we know, we have the only Master’s degree in care ethics throughout the world. Together with my colleagues Carlo Leget, Merel Visse, Frans Vosman, Alistair Niemeijer, Vivianne Baur and Anne Goossensen we teach (pre)master’s and graduate students, and do research here, in cooperation with many societal partners.
2. Can you tell us about your research and its relation to care ethics?
My PhD research was a philosophical-ethical study on self-sacrifice in caregiving (2014a, 2014b, 2015, 2017) and brought together care ethics, examples from literary fiction, movies and history, phenomenology, theology, political theory, and hermeneutics. My present research draws upon this work for thoughts and insights that I continue to elaborate and develop further. My research revolves around central insights of care ethics and care theory: relationality, affectivity, care as an attuning practice, embodiedness, vulnerability and dependency, and the political theory on care. I am now connecting all of these dimensions with empirical research. Also new themes emerge, like family care, care and the lived experience of pregnancy, birth-giving and child care, embodied forms of moral case deliberation, and the practice of belonging to a community.
3. How did you get involved in care ethics?
At the age of 18 I wanted to become a spiritual counsellor in hospitals and studied theology. There Annelies van Heijst introduced my fellow students and myself to care ethics. It felt like coming home: an ethical theory that drew upon everyday life’s questions, both on the personal, organisational and political level, that immediately struck a chord with me. Van Heijst’s work has not only become an enormous source of inspiration for myself, she has also developed our Master’s degree program in Care Ethics and Policy. So in more than one respect, hers are the shoulders on which we stand. Of course she was the supervisor of my doctoral thesis with which I graduated in 1995 (cum laude).
This thesis won the thesis award of the Tilburg University and was published as a book, not the first, but still one of the first Dutch books on care ethics, in 1996. As a result, I have been lecturing and publishing on care ethics ever since.
4. How would you describe care ethics?
Of course I could refer to the definition that my colleagues and me developed together (Leget et al 2017, forthcoming). But let me try to phrase it in some other words. Care ethics is an ethics that draws upon the practices to which we owe our lives, in which we are all inevitably involved and on which we spend time every day, i.e. the practices of care. Caring for ourselves, others we live with or meet, our environment, the world. Caring as a practice that essentially builds a ‘life-sustaining web’. What is more, caring is a practice in which we acknowledge and express who we are and aim to be personally and together with others, on an intimate scale with family, friends and colleagues, but also within institutions (e.g. the academia, health care), and as a society. Caring involves our body, our language, our attitude, our abilities, our knowledge and intuitions, the stories that we have heard and the inspiring examples that we received from other people’s lives, our best intentions, and our art. But no less does it involve our vulnerability and dependency, as well as our mistakes and failures, our pain and shortcomings, our misunderstood efforts and the inevitable harm that we cause each other. And care ethics draws upon all of this for seeking the good.
5. What is the most important thing you learned from care ethics?
A Dutch newspaper’s motto has been: ‘whetstone of the mind’. I think that this is what care ethics has taught me: to continuously sharpen insights. It taught me to challenge and change my thoughts and beliefs, over and over again. When I was a student, my thoughts about care and ethics differed quite a bit from what I have been thinking ever since I experienced pregnancy, becoming and being a mother, for instance. The enormous gap between what society expects of its citizens as entrepreneurs on the one hand, and the caring practices of personal life (caring for dependent others, being marginalized when dependent upon care) on the other, still puzzles me. And again, new perspectives challenged the previous ones when for years I taught ethics and trained professional caregivers in ethics. But really, I trained with them. They showed me the institutional and organizational pressure in which they work, the hierarchical power imbalance and lack of moral space, and also how and why they still, sometimes, found meaning in their work. New books and new teachers taught me to change my views again, for instance when submerging myself in French phenomenology and hermeneutics during my PhD study. Stories from fiction and real life, movies, experiences with loved ones who suffered or died, recovered or had to adapt their lives and identities to chronic illness, questioned the perspectives that I had understood before. And new government policies that transfer various forms of caring back into the informal sphere, on top of the care burden for the family, and how new forms of ‘belonging’ on a local level are expected to come about, lead to increasing need for research.
What I think all this comes down to, is that care ethics has taught me the importance of particularism, plurality, temporality, perspective, and the humble claims we can make of ‘truth’, especially in ethics. This does not lead to a conclusion of relativism, but rather to acknowledge the truth of a continuous, multidimensional, hermeneutical dialectic.
6. Whom would you consider to be your most important teacher(s) and collaborators?
As said above, Annelies van Heijst has been my most important teacher and collaborator. Further, I owe a lot to my PhD thesis supervisor Frans Vosman, who encouraged me to read Paul Ricoeur’s work. But it all began and still carries on with what I have learned from the works of Joan Tronto, Nel Noddings, Margaret Urban Walker, Eva Feder Kittay, Sarah Ruddick, and Carol Gilligan, of course. For my new themes I learn a lot from the works of Maurice Hamington, Helen Kohlen, Sophie Bourgault, my colleagues Carlo Leget, Merel Visse and Alistair Niemeijer, all of whom I am grateful to also cooperate with. New teachers, whose books inspire me and whom I would love to collaborate with in the future, are Christina Schües, Daniel Engster, and Jeannette Pols. And I love the lessons, inspiration and collaboration that I continue to receive from all the professional and informal caregivers and care receivers whom I meet as friends and students and in my family.
7. What publications do you consider the most important with regard to care ethics?
The top 5 would be:
Joan C. Tronto, Moral Boundaries,
Eva Feder Kittay, Love’s Labor,
Margaret Urban Walker, Moral Understandings,
Sarah Ruddick, Maternal Thinking, and
Annelies van Heijst, Professional Loving Care.
But still, care ethics is developing and perhaps the most important publications are those who carry the torch at present, carving out new space in international politics, disability studies, feminist studies, health care policy, family ethics and family policy, philosophical anthropology, moral epistemology, environmental ethics (for which the Dutch Henk Manschot coined the term ‘terrasophy’), as for all of these there is still so much work to do. Naming just a few would do injustice to others. The establishment and development of this international care ethics research consortium, is essential for connecting people of all six continents together, preventing a fragmentation of care ethics.
8. Which of your own books/articles/projects should we learn from?
Probably my dissertation Sacrifice. A care ethical reappraisal of sacrifice and self-sacrifice (2015, Leuven: Peeters) would be valuable, but my recent articles draw upon that work and develop it further:
Nistelrooij A.A.M. van, Visse M.A., Spekkink A & Lange J. de (2017), How shared is Shared Decision Making? A care-ethical view on the role of partner and the family. Journal of Medical Ethics (doi:10.1136/medethics-2016-103791)
Nistelrooij, A.A.M. van & Leget, C.J.W. (2016). Against dichotomies: on mature care and self-sacrifice in care ethics. Nursing Ethics, 1-10. doi: 10.1177/0969733015624475
Nistelrooij, A.A.M. van, Schaafsma, E.P. & Tronto, J.C. (2014). Ricoeur and the ethics of care. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 17 (4), 485-491. doi: 10.1007/s11019-014-9595-4
Nistelrooij, A.A.M. van (2014). Self-sacrifice and self-affirmation within care-giving. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 17 (4), 519-528. doi: 10.1007/s11019-013-9523-z
I am currently developing the following projects:
a care ethical view on pregnancy, giving birth and the practice of parenthood as an embodied and meaningful caring practice;
a care ethical view on ethical reflection (including non-verbal, embodied knowledge) and what this requires of the setting of a caring institution, together with prof. dr. Helen Kohlen, Philosophisch-Theologische Hochschule Vallendar, Germany;
diversity and caring as co-creative practice in a (local) community.
9. What are important issues for care ethics in the future?
There are many. The core questions remain: how can we include the practices and experiences of everyday life in all its plurality and particularity in moral thought; how can we build a (national and international) society that puts these practices, experiences and knowledge central; and how can we thus carve out space for what those involved in caring experience, know, and have to tell. One of the most urgent questions, I think, in my Western society is the marginalization of those who cannot meet the demands of self-management, independence, participation, and finding their way in the institutional maze of care. Too many are simply overburdened with their condition, with their caring tasks either for themselves or for close others, and require that we as a society are affected by them and care for them. Instead, they are hardly heard, their caring needs are not met because they do not meet the strict criteria that the system poses, or they are losing their supporting network in a cycle of loss: loss of job, loss of status and means, loss of contacts and network, causing increased marginalization and loneliness.
10. How may care ethics contribute to society as a whole, do you think?
I think that the important thing for us to do is to keep sharpening our insights, uncovering real life experiences through empirical research, keep bringing our insights to the fore, educating students and thus disseminating our insights. The problem for small countries like The Netherlands is, that academic requirements demand us to publish in English, international journals. That is essential for the academic exchange, but it simultaneously is a serious threat for our societal impact in our own community.
11. Do you know of any research-based projects in local communities, institutions or on national levels, where ‘care’ is central? Please describe.
I see institutions trying to do so, especially institutions for those whom we used to call people with mental disabilities. But, as the organization Prisma has stated, we should call them people with a societal disability, as the problem is not their mental state, but the ways in which society makes it difficult for them to participate. We are developing our cooperation in research together with Prisma.
Also new, inclusive communities have come about and increasingly seem to grow in numbers, in which people with and without visible impairments live together.
But in our country the dominant discourse in politics, caring institutions and local communities is still that of autonomy, self-management, independence, etc. in a way that still marginalizes caring from the public and political deliberation.
12. The aim of the consortium is to further develop care ethics internationally by creating connections between people who are involved in this interdisciplinary field, both in scientific and societal realms. Do you have any recommendations for us?
I hope and wish that the consortium helps increase the impact of care ethics, by bringing researchers together and enabling cooperation in research and education. I definitely believe that cooperation leads to greater impact, that exchange inspires, that co-constitution of ethics improves its quality, and that care ethics will help build a better society for all. My wish would be to create an international structure that supports this research network. Thoughts that come to mind are: an expert centre that coordinates and supports an international journal, a website, a research fund, annual or biannual conferences etc.
Interview with prof.dr. Carlo Leget, Chair Care Ethics, University of Humanistic Studies, The Netherlands.
1. Where are you working at this moment?
Since 2012 I am a full professor in Care Ethics at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, The Netherlands. At the same university I hold an endowed chair in Ethical and spiritual questions in palliative care, established by the Association Hospice Care Netherlands.
2. Can you tell us about your research and its relation to care ethics?
My research is situated at the intersection between care ethics and spirituality or meaning, and my main area of expertise is in palliative care and end-of-life issues. In my view care practices are an important source for a meaningful life, and care ethics offers an excellent entrance to reflecting on meaning in a way that makes us aware of how the way we organize society has a great impact on what people experience.
One of my PhD-students e.g. interviewed older people who are tired with life – and who are the subject of a debate on euthanasia in my country – and was able to demonstrate that these people suffer from existential problems that are related to the way we have organized our society.
3. How did you get involved in care ethics?
I was trained as a theologian and during the writing of my PhD thesis on life and death in the theology of Thomas Aquinas I became more and more interested in ethics. I switched from theology to medical ethics, but I gradually became more and more critical to mainstream medical ethics. In 2009 I had the opportunity of switching to an associate professorship in care ethics and that has been a great inspiration ever since.
4. How would you define care ethics?
I see care ethics as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry to which many disciplines are contributing since the beginning of the 1980’s.
5. What is the most important thing you learned from care ethics?
I have a strong tendency to rationalize and abstract from the concrete messiness of life. That is why I was probably so attracted to the scholastic thinking of Aquinas – although getting to know him, I discovered that he is often misunderstood. What many people do not know e.g. is that he wrote the largest medieval treatise on emotions (passiones animae) in the Middle Ages.
When I was young, I was a typical ‘Jake’ kind of guy, and care ethics taught me to see the value of ‘Amy’s way’, to put it in terms of Gilligan’s book. Or to put it differently: epistemologically care ethics has turned my world upside down.
6. Whom would you consider to be your most important teacher(s) in this area?
This is hard to tell, because I have learned so much from so many authors. In the Netherlands I think Annelies van Heijst has been a great inspiration. Internationally the three authors that have changed my way of looking of things are Carol Gilligan, Joan Tronto and Margaret Urban Walker.
7. What publications do you consider the most important with regard to care ethics?
Another hard question. For me personally the books of these four women have been very important: Professional Loving Care, In a Different Voice, Moral Boundaries, and Moral Understandings. After the impact of these books, authors I got to know afterwards seem to be less ground breaking. But I know that my thinking is also influenced by many others, like Maurice Hamington, Daniel Engster, Helen Kohlen, Fabienne Brugères and Sophie Bourgault, to name but a few.
8. Which of your own books/articles should we read?
9. What are important issues for care ethics in the future?
For me the great thing about care ethics is that it opens a space for interdisciplinary cooperation inspired by a common idea of the importance of creating a complex and life-sustaining web that makes the world a better place to live in, to quote freely from Joan Tronto’s and Berenice Fischer’s definition. Such a web involves all kinds of connections between disciplines and traditions, and for me the integration of empirical and theoretical research is very important. But also the possibility to connect different approaches like phenomenology, practice theory and political theory in order to create something that does justice to the richness of the concept of care.
10. How may care ethics contribute to society as a whole, do you think?
By taking part in societal debates in newspapers, radio, television and social media, and presenting people a different way of looking at the world. But also by educating students. I am very proud of the Master’s degree in care ethics we run at our university, where (mainly) professionals are introduced to care ethics. When they return to their jobs they are important ambassadors of a care ethical way of looking at the world.
11. Do you know of any research-based projects in local communities, institutions or on national levels, where ‘care’ is central? Please describe.
There are many projects that come to my mind, but not all of them have reflected well on what care is. One project I am involved in myself focuses at enabling patients and families who are involved in palliative care to share their thoughts and worries on an existential level. I think palliative care is a very interesting field for care ethical reflection, because it is all about dealing with relationships, corporeality, vulnerability, power relations and meaning or spirituality.
12. The aim of the consortium is to further develop care ethics internationally by creating connections between people who are involved in this interdisciplinary field, both in scientific and societal realms. Do you have any recommendations for us?
My recommendation is that it is important to travel and to meet people face to face. We cannot live by reading and writing alone: if we take central insights of care ethics like the importance of corporeality seriously, we must meet in person and experience the personal concerns behind our scientific work. Building a care ethical movement is about more than transporting ideas. It is also about building a living network of relations. From there we will develop further agenda’s and collaborations.
Care Ethics Research Consortium 