Care practices and acts of citizenship in liminal spaces: positive marginality and social change

What if the work of a nurse, physio or homecare worker was designated an art so that the qualities of the experiences they create became understood as aesthetic qualities? What if the interactions created by artists, directors, dancers, or workshop facilitators were understood as works of care? Care Aesthetics is the first full-length book to explore these questions and examine the work of carer artists and artist carers to explain the importance of valuing and supporting aesthetically caring relations across multiple aspects of our lives. This is a vital book for anyone engaged with socially engaged arts or social and health care practices on an academic or professional level. This book is also part of a larger-scale research project on care aesthetics that Dr. Thompson leads at the University of Manchester: here:https://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/funding-awarded-to-researchers-exploring-care-aesthetics/

Peeters Publishers is proud to announce the 13th installment in its Ethics of Care Series, Care Ethics, Religion, and Spiritual Traditions, edited by Inge van Nistelrooij, Maureen Sander-Staudt, and Maurice Hamington.

Care Ethics, Religion, and Spiritual Traditions is the first-of-its-kind a collection of original essays that address the intersection between contemporary feminist care ethics and religious morality. This collection includes contributions from an international and multidisciplinary array of scholars: Ruth E. Groenhout, Maurice Hamington, Adriana Jesenková, Luigina Mortari, Sarah Munawar, Inge van Nistelrooij, Kimberley D. Parzuchowski, Jamie Pitts, Martin Robb, Jason Rubenstein, Robert Michael Ruehl, Maureen Sander-Staudt, Steven Steyl, and Sarah Zager. The volume also includes a foreword by Catherine Keller.

Thanks to a collaboration between Peeters Publishing, University of Humanistic Studies, and Portland State University, Care Ethics, Religion, and Spiritual Traditions is available as an open-access book free for researchers and students to download.

A special issue of the journal, Philosophies, edited by Maurice Hamington, of Portland State University and Maggie FitzGerald of the University of Saskatchewan, is now available online.  The issue’s theme is “Feminist Care Ethics Confronts Mainstream Philosophy.” The special issue includes a dozen articles by international scholars of care.  Each contribution juxtaposes care with the works of significant philosophers or philosophies, including Bruno Latour, John Locke, Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Slavoj Zizek & G.W.F. Hegel, Edith Stein, Jacques Ranciere, Frantz Fanon, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ludwig Wittgenstein as well as the intellectual tradition of liberalism.  

Contributors include Sandra Laugier, Asha Leena Bhandary, Tiina Vaittinen, Anya Daly, Maggie FitzGerald, Sophie Bourgault, Petr Urban, Sacha Ghanderharian, Deniz Durmus, Catherine Chaberty & Christine Noel Lemaitre, Thomas Randall, and Michael Flower & Maurice Hamington.  

This is an open-access publication, so you and your students can find all the articles here free of charge:

www.mdpi.com/journal/philosophies/special_issues/Feminist_Care_Ethics

Urgent attention is needed to re-address maternity, mothering, and related matters in terms of caring. The ethics of care provides an important framework to take up issues of reproductive justice and intersections with new developments in technology. In this call, we invite scholarly contributions that can further our understanding of processes, practices, and policies towards enhancing human flourishing in and around mothering.

Our provisional plan is to create two volumes on ‘Care Ethics, Birthing, and Mothering’ with two linked but distinct focal points (reproductive justice and technology respectively) in the book series ‘Ethics of Care’, published by Peeters Publishers, Leuven, Belgium. The editors will work in close collaboration on the two volumes, and a selected contribution may be included in either of these volumes depending on its fit. An initial selection will be done based on the abstract (approximately 350 words), while the final selection will be based on a review of the full paper (6000-8000 words).

Volume I: Reproductive Justice: Care Ethics and Beyond

Editors: Inge van Nistelrooij, Rodante van der Waal, Veronica Mitchell

Abstracts of approximately 350 words are to be submitted to Inge at i.vannistelrooij@uvh.nl before April 3, 2022.

Volume II: Technology, Mothering, and Care Ethics

Editors: Amrita Banerjee and Priya Sharma

Abstracts of approximately 350 words to be submitted to Amrita at abanerjee.phi@iitb.ac.in

before April 3, 2022.

Enjoy the recording of a Special Panel on COVID politics & Care Ethics Research

Panel Chair: Fiona Robinson.

“Beyond Wealth Care: Caring Democratically as the Path to a Multiracial, Non-imperial, Caring” (Joan Tronto)
“A Care Ethical Analysis of COVID-19 Policymaking: how to set up research with societal impact?” (Carlo Leget)
“Crisis of Care: Vulnerability, Responsibility and Needs in Times of Corona” (Adrienne de Ruiter)
“Giving Voice to Vulnerable Groups: Doing Action Research during a Pandemic” (Pieter Dronkers)

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF CARE: GLOBAL AND LOCAL CHAINS

A longstanding criticism of mainstream political philosophy centres on the denial of care work and the assertion of an autarkic, self-sufficient subject. However, in addition to this (rather academic) criticism by care ethics, an extensive body of literature has emerged from lived experiences of political and social struggles, primarily from feminists (of colour) that put friendship, love, and coalition-building center stage (Ahmed, Anzaldúa, Black Lives Matter, Care Collective, Combahee River Collective, Dalla Costa, Federici, hooks, Lorde, Precarias a la deriva, Puig Della Casa, Sandoval, etc.). This crisis of care reveals and acknowledges multiple dimensions of structural, relational, and interpersonal violence and oppression at the intersections of class, gender, and race.

The Covid-19 pandemic highlights once again that care work in most countries is rendered almost exclusively by women who are poorly paid and insufficiently valued for their labour. While some attempt to juggle job and family responsibilities at the expense of their own mental and physical health, others risk criminalization and destitution due to insecure residency status or lack of permission to work. Indeed, the chains of care have increasingly acquired a transnational character and exploit the indentured labour of those who cross borders to care for others. Take, for example, women from the Philippines and other south-east Asian countries who provide cleaning services and take care of children elsewhere in the world in order to afford the nourishment and schooling of their own; or, care work for the elderly and sick in western Europe that is done by eastern European women who rarely get to see their own relatives. Whether paid or unpaid, care work is disproportionately carried out by racialized and gendered groups in precarious positions. Finally, in an attempt to protect their own populations and to compensate for the austerity of public healthcare provision, so-called developed countries actively recruit medical professionals from former or current colonies, who then staff hospitals and risk their lives during the pandemic while separated from those care networks that sustain their work. The acquisition and accumulation of PPE and vaccines further exacerbate global inequities in public healthcare. Read more.

This upcoming Friday, June 12, at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, there will be a public live stream on Caring. Also virtual screenings, performances and workshops on June 13 and 14 and a range of artistic, activist and scholarly texts on the New Alphabet School blog. Source and read more.