The Careful Thinking podcast is back, and the first episode of the new autumn season features my conversation with Emmanouela Mandalaki. Originally from Greece, Emmanouela is currently Professor of Organisations at NEOMA Business School in France. Her research interests are impressively diverse, though everything she writes is underpinned by a desire to understand how people relate to and care for each other in organisations, and all of her research is grounded in feminist care ethics. Emmanouela’s work is also characterised by her use of innovative research methods, involving collective autoethnography and storytelling, and by experiments in academic writing, for example pioneering the use of poetry in organisation studies.

In getting to know Emmanouela’s work, I’ve been intrigued to discover the ways in which care theory is being applied to the study of business and organisations, an area that, I must confess, I knew very little about beforehand, but which I’ve found fascinating to explore. I’m grateful to Maurice Hamington, a previous guest and a good friend of the podcast, for introducing me to Emmanouela, who cites Maurice’s pioneering work on Embodied Care as a significant influence on her thinking. The emphasis throughout her work on the importance of the experience of shared embodiment in understanding caring interactions also has resonances with that of other previous guests on the podcast: I’m thinking in particular of Christine Leroy’s writing on kinaesthetic empathy and Susi Ferrarello’s work on intercorporeality and interaffectivity.

                                                           Emmanouela Mandalaki

Emmanouela’s writing on what she perceives as an absence of care in higher education reminded me of my recent interview with Slovak care theorist Adriana Jesenková, whose research highlights the deficit of care in her country’s education system and explores the ways in which the education system can ‘develop, cultivate and strengthen the human capacity to care for human relations’.

As someone whose original field of study was literature, I’m intrigued by Emmanouela’s use of poetry in her work, which resonates with my growing interest in the ways in which imaginative writing can express ideas about care, as well as itself being a practice of care. In my conversation with Emmanouela, I mentioned Andrea Hiott’s recent suggestion that ‘writing is a form of care’, and I wondered whether using poetry in academic writing could be seen a particularly ‘care-ful’ gesture, since it involves making oneself vulnerable to the reader, rather than hiding behind academic language. Emmanouela’s work in this area also brought to mind Maurice Hamington and Ce Rosenow’s book exploring the connections between Care Ethics and Poetry, which I warmly recommend.

I began my conversation with Emmanouela by asking her about her early life in Greece and her experience of studying in France, before moving on to discuss her work for commercial and non-profit organisations in multiple countries around the world, and how this led to her decision to undertake research on organisational ethics. Emmanouela listed some of the main theoretical influences on her thinking, including leading feminist thinkers like Rosalyn Diprose, Sara Ahmed and Hélène Cixous, as well as many of the key names in the field of organisation studies.

We spent some time talking about Emmanouela’s experience as a volunteer on the island of Lesbos with refugees from the Middle East and Africa, and how she drew on this experience to explore the importance of shared embodiment and vulnerability in organising solidarity initiatives. Similar themes emerged from Emmanouela’s reflection on her personal experience of bodily injury and fragility, which we also discussed.

We then discussed Emmanouela’s writing on the absence of care in academia, which draws on the work of key thinkers in feminist care ethics, such as Joan Tronto and Eva Feder Kittay (my guest on the previous episode of Careful Thinking and the subject of my last post). One of the ways in which Emmanouela suggests academics can respond to this is by working collaboratively: sharing with others in the processes of research, and at the same experimenting with new forms of collective writing, has characterised much of her work. We focused particularly on Emmanouela’s use of poetry in her writing, including her recent work exploring the potential for using poetry in organisation studies. Finally, Emmanouela shared some insights into her current research, which includes projects with refugees in Ukraine and on homelessness in Argentina.

                                  L to R: Rosalyn Diprose, Hélène Cixous and Sara Ahmed

Here are some quotes by Emmanouela from our conversation:

I would probably summarise my work as work that is trying to understand how people relate and care for and with each other in organisations and how we can speak around these issues in ways that do justice to the context that we’re studying. And in this...I experiment...with different ways of writing that are very much informed by feminist epistemology and feminist theories, including theories in care ethics, which allow me to give words to the phenomenon that I study. And usually the phenomena that I study are phenomena related to vulnerabilities, questions of gender, social inequalities, and all of these issues that are quite silenced in mainstream literature that I seek to un-silence and unveil through the work that I do.

...

I travelled to Lesbos, I acted as a volunteer in a camp for about two weeks the first time, and then I had a follow-up visit. And this was a really eye-opening experience. I mean, when I was there, I didn’t even know what I wanted to do with all of that knowledge...What am I doing here? Am I just here to publish a paper? Or there is maybe something different to do, something more meaningful? Just being there, listening to the stories of the people, or just distributing some food might be enough...My intention was not really to write a paper and to publish a paper, but was just to... understand what’s going on, how these privileges and vulnerabilities are so unequally distributed in the social world...and also realise which are my own privileges in this context, and how can I use my competencies and capacities to actually do something about it...But I was really interested in being there, understanding people’s stories, being able to do something for my capacity as a researcher that will probably raise a different light, a different awareness around the issues that were seen in the news.

...

So my main argument here is to say that, speaking of solidarity organising, we might need to give some more attention to the body. And when I’m talking about the body, I’m speaking very much about the material body, the actual needs of the material body, which in this context in particular is very vulnerable...but also the recognition of vulnerability itself, how recognising the vulnerable body is allowing us to understand vulnerability as an existential and social condition that we share with the others. And this brings us together in a very special way of relating ethically with each other. So then we understand ethics not just as a mind-driven process which is about an ethical duty to be performed and applied equally across contexts, but it raises attention to the contextual vulnerability, to the contextual needs of the body, which are very much put into the centre the moment that we understand that this body has some special needs that need to be taken care of. So this is much of my argument there: embodied affectivity, how the vulnerability and the recognition of vulnerability allows us to understand the needs of the bodies, but also intercorporeal generosity that is emerging through this ethical process of relating...I’m trying to understand solidarity organising not just as a process that is about logistical organising, about mind-driven organising, but it’s something that is emerging through the actual needs of the body in this particular moment in time.

...

That [injury] was such of a life-changing experience. It was the first time in my life that I felt bodily incapable of doing something, even going to the bathroom, going from the living room to the kitchen to have a glass of water...So then I realised what it means actually to not be able to use your body in an able way, I mean, in a way that enables you to be self-independent, to be self-sufficient. And so then I realised how much we overestimate these ideas of independence, the ability to do things alone. And this allowed me to understand even more how the actual vulnerability of the body, which is a very material vulnerability...how this vulnerable body is seeking care....And...when you’ve learned your whole life to be able to do things by yourself, then it’s completely new, completely unknown how to accept our vulnerability...I need to be able to receive and accept the care of others and also to return that care in ways that others might need it from me.

...

Working collaboratively...allows us to understand how different we all are and how we might work around these differences to actually say something that is important for all of us. And the moment that I started speaking more and writing more about my work, I started also realising that I’m not alone. Because people were coming back and saying, ‘Oh, thank you for writing that...it’s also my own experience, and I would never say it or voice it enough before I saw someone writing about it.’ So...I think we need to voice more our struggles, we need to speak more around our struggles. And writing collectively is a way to do so, because we’re all very different, we come all from very different backgrounds and positionalities. And so writing with others allows us to understand that our experience is not a unique experience...But also that we’re not alone, that we might be sharing similar or different vulnerabilities in ways that we didn’t even know of before sharing this.

...

Vulnerability is not just a social, material condition, but it’s also an epistemic condition. Vulnerability has an epistemic element where we realise when we engage in these methodologies that we cannot know everything, we cannot know the other fully. And poetry is allowing us to express this process in a quite powerful way, I have to say, that plain academic language might not allow us to explain. So for me, poetry carries this sensitivity and this sensibility and this gentleness that allows to say things in a different way and to try to do justice to an extent, to the phenomena that we study, which might include vulnerable experiences, experience of marginalisation, experiences of vulnerability that plain academic language might not be enough to put into words.

You can listen to the whole episode here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can download a transcript of the episode here:

Careful Thinking Emmanouela Mandalaki Transcript

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In other news…

On the subject of care and the education system: I was contacted recently by Professors Toby Greany and Pat Thomson from the School of Education at Nottingham University, who had read my Substack post on ‘Education as a practice of care’. They wanted to let me know that they have been exploring similar questions as part of their recent research project on Sustainable School Leadership. The project ‘researched how the UK nations recruit, train and retain school leaders, and investigate how well their approaches take account of individual, local and systemic needs, in particular in relation to the sustainability of leadership supply, its diversity, equity, quality and fitness for the future’.

Toby notes that, based on their findings, the project team decided to add ‘an ethic of education and care’, drawing on the work of Nell Noddings and Joan Tronto, to their conceptual framework, ‘as it was clear that schools and school leaders are wrestling with expanding “care” needs, but many are struggling with how to conceptualise and accommodate that within their educational remits and roles.’

Toby and Pat currently have a journal article under review that focuses on these issues, as well as a forthcoming book with a chapter on an ethic of care in education. In the meantime, this episode of their project podcast explores the question ‘Why and how does school leadership today reflect an ethic of education and care?’ Pat has also co-written an article developing ‘a framework for care-full teacher learning’, based on research with art teachers, and a book chapter on ‘Leading with a feminist ethic of care’ in the context of educational leadership. I’ll share further details of outputs from their research as they become available.

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The header image for this post is the painting ‘Mirror of Humanity’ by Joseph Kangi, originally from South Sudan, but now living in Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos (via The Hope Project). Permission requested.

One of the highest compliments one scholar can pay another is to debate their ideas at length in print, with respectful disagreement a sign that you think the other’s work important enough to devote time and effort to engaging with in detail.

The last few weeks have seen the publication of two journal articles which take issue with aspects of the work of the feminist philosopher and care theorist Eva Feder Kittay, who was my guest for the most recent episode of the Careful Thinking podcast. The authors of both articles emphasise their deep admiration for Kittay’s writing and their sympathy with the general direction of her thinking, while thoughtfully disagreeing with one or other of her arguments.

                                                                Eva Feder Kittay

One of the articles is by another of my recent podcast guests, the legal scholar Erika Bachiochi. In my interview with Erika, she emphasised ‘how much I love Kittay’s work’ and in particular the latter’s ground-breaking book Love’s Labor: Essays on Women and Equality. Bachiochi explained that she sees herself and Kittay ‘as both critics of liberalism and the idea of this kind of mythical, autonomous individual as being the lode star in our thinking about politics and economics’, adding that ‘I really just think that the way she articulates responsibilities for others is the exact right one, so that they arise out of need and vulnerability…I just think talking about that we are each some mother’s child is a really beautiful way of putting that’.

However, in our conversation on the podcast, we also discussed an article that Erika published in 2016, in which she criticised Kittay’s tendency, as she saw it, to minimise the distinctive role of fathers in families and to overemphasise the supportive role of the state: ‘Kittay...doesn’t want to look to the traditional provider...who was for centuries the husband, but she wants to right away go to the modern state’. Instead, Erika argued, ‘there’s a way in which we can elevate that paternal ethic of care. We can call more upon men to engage in an ethic of care in the family.’

Here I should add the caveat that, in her most recent book, Learning from My Daughter: The Value and Care of Disabled Minds, and in her conversation with me on the podcast, Kittay presented a more nuanced view of the role of the state in care, emphasising the valuable part that can be played by ‘caring communities’, and suggesting ‘maybe keeping the state pretty far away from the actual dependency relationships themselves’.

The title of Bachiochi’s new article, ‘We are all some father’s child: toward a paternal ethic of care’, which was published last month in the Hungarian Journal of Legal Studies, pays tribute to Kittay’s phrase ‘some mother’s child’, while the essay itself expands on her earlier critique and at the same time develops in some detail the alternative ideas about paternal care that Bachiochi hinted at in the podcast. I was honoured when Erika asked me to review an early draft of the paper and also gratified that she cites the article I wrote on ‘Men’s Care: Same or Different’ for the online journal Fairer Disputations, though my treatment of the topic there was brief and superficial compared to Erika’s in-depth exploration in this latest piece.

                                                              Erika Bachiochi

Leaving aside its debate with Kittay, Bachiochi’s essay is also a brilliant defence of fatherhood as an embodied practice of care, one that is distinctive from motherhood in important ways, and in my view it constitutes a valuable contribution to the ongoing debate about gender and care. It’s one of those pieces of writing where you want to quote all of it, but for reasons of space, I’ll just share the abstract here, and encourage you to make time to read the whole thing:

Motherhood assumes fatherhood. This statement was long self-evident. But with high rates of non-marital childbearing, divorce and single motherhood across the Western world over the last half century, as well as the more recent development of reproductive technologies, a normative relationship of fatherhood to motherhood is no longer assumed. Yet even with these rapid technological and cultural shifts, the existence of a particular child today still transforms a particular woman into a ‘mother’ and a particular man into a ‘father’, at least as a matter of biological relation.

Engaging the classic work of care ethicist, Eva Feder Kittay, I seek in this article to offer a more capacious - and indeed, normative - account of fatherhood, or a paternal ethic of care. Like a maternal ethic of care, the paternal ethic of care is based on a unique personal relation of embodied care, an obligation that arises from being an equal (paternal) source of the child’s existence, one who is specially situated to care for this particular child and his or her mother. As such, paternal care is characteristically distinctive from maternal care in its uniquely situated, special responsibility to create the safe, secure and just conditions that caregiving mothers need to carry out their duties of care with freedom and confidence and that dependent children need to become mature, agentic adults.

The other recent article which engages with Kittay’s work was published online just last week in Hypatia, the journal of feminist philosophy. It’s by the political philosopher Daniel Engster, whose many publications include Care Ethics and Political Theory, which he co-edited with Maurice Hamington (my guest in Episode 6 of the Careful Thinking podcast) and the forthcoming Care and Moral Theory, which Engster is co-editing with Steven Steyl (whom I interviewed for Episode 10).

                                                              Daniel Engster

Engster’s article, which has the title ‘Does care need completing?’, is a response to Kittay’s argument, in Learning From My Daughter, that ‘not only do we sometimes have a duty to care, but we also have a duty to receive care graciously if it’s offered with goodwill and with the requisite attention and competence insofar as we have the capacity to discharge such a duty’ and her claim that without such acknowledgement on the part of the one being cared for, care is not ‘complete’. As Eva said in her conversation with me on the podcast:

The carer needs that kind of recognition from the cared for in order to deal with the difficulties and yes, the sacrifices that they undergo...So I think there’s actually more responsibility to receive care graciously when offered with requisite skill and good faith, if you can, if it’s possible.

In his new article Engster explains at length why he thinks this is a flawed line of thinking. As with Bachiochi’s essay, it’s a closely argued piece of writing and it’s important to read the whole thing. But again, I’ll share the abstract here to give you a sense of his main argument:

Feminist, disability, and other theorists have long expressed concerns about the seeming paternalism implicit in care. In Learning From My Daughter, Eva Kittay aims to put these concerns to rest. Exploring more fully than previous care theorists the final phase of caregiving, she argues that good care requires ‘completion’, by which she means explicit or implicit subjective endorsement by the care receiver of the goods or benefits the caregiver provides them. Insofar as subjective endorsement is necessary for good care, good care by definition cannot be paternalistic.

This article argues, however, that Kittay’s attempt to distinguish care from paternalism is mired in problems. It does not provide a reliable standard for distinguishing good care from bad or even effective protection against paternalistic abuse. In place of Kittay’s completion standard, I defend an objective standard of good care based on Stephen Darwall’s theory of rational care but amended to include insights from care theorists about the importance of attentiveness, responsiveness, and respect in the practice of good care. Overall, the article clarifies the standards of good care with particular attention to the danger of paternalism implicit in it.

The reference here is to Darwall’s 2003 book Welfare and Rational Care which argues that good care involves successfully promoting a person’s welfare, which ‘is constituted, not by what the person values, prefers, or wants (or should value), but by what one (perhaps she) should want insofar as one cares about her.’

Engster’s argument, that it’s possible to develop an objective account of what constitutes ‘good’ care, regardless of the subjective response of those on the receiving end, is a compelling one. As he suggests, Kittay’s ‘subjective endorsement standard’ for good care can easily lapse into a problematic subjectivism and can be susceptible to forms of ‘paternalistic abuse’. I’m reminded of my conversation, in Episode 24 of Careful Thinking, with my Open University colleague Vince Mitchell, about his research on the ethics of dementia care, and the difficulties of determining the ‘real’ views of dementia sufferers regarding their care preferences.

However, I’m not sure I was completely persuaded by Engster’s counter-argument. Can we really assess the quality of an act of caregiving independently of how it ‘lands’? Perhaps we can express it like this:

We can never know if we have cared well.

We always know if we have been well cared for.

What I’m trying to capture here is the sense that, when we care for another person, there is no way of knowing or feeling intuitively whether we’ve got it ‘right’. On the other hand, when we’re on the receiving end of care, we do know instinctively, at a deep and somatic level, whether we have been well cared for. This suggests that, in some sense, we need the confirmation or acknowledgement of the one who is cared for in order to determine whether care has been achieved or accomplished.

I’ve written before about my research with grieving fathers who experienced healing and repair through participation in sports teams for bereaved men, and how in those settings, although it was clear that care had ‘happened’, it was difficult to say who were the caregivers and who the cared for. One might say that, rather than being something that was delivered, like a ready-made package, from one person to another, care was something - a quality, an experience - that emerged from the interactions and relationships between two or more persons.

Could we generalise this to all care, and say that care is an emergent property and that, because of its fundamentally relational nature, it requires the engagement and confirmation of all parties in an interaction for it to be achieved? This would suggest that searching for an ‘objective’ or ‘rational’ standard of care will always be flawed.

At the same time (and maybe here’s a radical thought to end with) perhaps care is always, by its very nature, incomplete - imperfect, unfinished – since it’s impossible to completely meet the needs of another human being? Over the summer I’ve been reading a biography of the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti, who maintained that all attempts in art were doomed to failure. As he said: ‘The more you fail, the more you succeed…the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it.’ Or as his friend the playwright Samuel Beckett put it: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ Could we say something similar about care: that all our attempts will always fall short of ‘perfect’ care, if such a thing could ever exist, so that searching for ‘completion’ in care is to pursue a chimera? In the words of the contemporary Italian philosopher Giusi Venuti: ‘Care cannot be fully grounded as a stable normative principle because it is structurally exposed to failure, ambiguity, and potential misuse.’ [1]

These are just a few initial, random thoughts suggested by reading these two articles. Feel free to add your own thoughts in the comments.

Note

1. ‘On the Aporetic Nature of Care: A Practice-Based Contribution to the Medical Humanities’ (working paper). In her forthcoming book Il vero si tocca. Del gesto che pensa, Venuti describes the way in which ‘a gesture of care can be clinically correct and still leave the other person alone’ (personal communication).

In other news…

Speaking of Eva Kittay: publishing my interview with Eva in July led to the most successful month of the Careful Thinking podcast to date, attracting 364 unique listeners and 497 downloads in those four weeks alone. Since the podcast launched in late 2023, it has attracted more than 6,000 listeners in total, from 83 countries and from every continent. If you haven’t done so already, you can subscribe via Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And in just the past week, I was delighted to see that this Substack newsletter, which I launched at the beginning of 2024, gained its 400th subscriber. That may not seem a huge number compare to some other Substacks, but I’m gratified that there are 400 people out there who are interested in exploring ideas about care. If you’re not yet one of them, then please consider signing up, to ensure you don’t miss out on regular updates about the Careful Thinking podcast, as well as reviews of books, seminars, exhibitions, and other care-related news. It’s free and it always will be.

And finally…

Care is cool these days and it seems everyone wants a piece of the action, including commercial companies. Returning from a recent holiday in Portugal, I noticed this advertisement for Zurich Insurance at Lisbon Airport. It translates roughly as ‘we care, to make sure everything goes well.’

But can corporations really care? Maybe that’s a subject for another time.

In the meantime, on the slightly related topic of whether institutions, rather than individuals, can care, check out this brilliant recent post by Mélina Magdelénat.

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The header image for this post is a reproduction of the painting ‘Communication Concept’ by Stella Levi (via istockphoto.com).

How do contemporary artists represent care in their work? And what insights can art offer into the experience of caring and being cared for?

These are questions I’ve explored in a number of episodes of the Careful Thinking podcast, including my conversations with philosopher and dancer Christine Leroy (Episode 7); with James Thompson, author of Care Aesthetics: For Artful Care and Careful Art (Episode 11); and with artist and care theorist Merel Visse (Episode 21); as well as in my Substack reviews of Christine’s book on Kinaesthetic Empathy, Ethics and Care, James’ co-edited volume on Care Aesthetics and the Arts, and Merel’s co-edited journal special issue on ‘Art for the sake of care’.

As a regular visitor to art galleries, I’ve also noticed that care has been the focus of a number of recent exhibitions, both here in Britain and abroad. Earlier this year the prestigious Albertina Museum in Vienna organised an exhibition with the title Care Matters, featuring works by contemporary women artists from the Verbund Collection. The exhibition was based on the premiss that ‘caring forms the foundation of human coexistence’ and it aimed to ‘make care work – often invisible and performed under precarious working conditions - visible’, seeking to increase ‘appreciation of care work, which is still predominantly performed by women.’

                            Mary Sibande, 'They don’t make them like they used to', 2008
                                        Verbund Collection, Vienna  © Mary Sibande

For those of us unable to visit the exhibition in person, the museum website usefully features a selection of images from the show, which give some sense of the kind of works exhibited. I was struck by one particular piece (above) by South African sculptor, painter, and installation artist Mary Sibande, whose work interrogates the intersections of race, gender and labour in her home country, exploring her own family’s legacy of forced domestic work under apartheid. As someone commented when Sibande posted this image on her Instagram site: ‘This spoke to me...it reminds me of all the sacrifices my mom and grandma made just so I could have a future.’

Judging by the selection of images on the Albertina website, the exhibition focused more on women’s domestic labour than on interpersonal care. However, some of the featured art works explored maternal care, a striking example being German conceptual artist Hannah Cooke’s photographic composition Ada vs Abramović (below), created as a response to Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović’s claim that it’s impossible to combine a life dedicated to art with motherhood. Cooke stages herself with her infant daughter Ada in a setting which ‘quotes’ Abramović’s work The artist is present, while in a parallel work she does something similar with British artist Tracy Emin’s creation My Bed. As art historian Nicole Grothe, writing on Cooke’s website, comments: ‘In these two works she shows herself to us as an artist and a mother and challenges us to question stereotypes’. Cooke has also exhibited her work here in England: for example, as part of the 2025 Motherother show at the New Bridge Project in Newcastle upon Tyne, which explored ‘the relationship that artist mothers have with themselves, their children, society, politics and the artworld.’

                                       Hannah Cooke, 'Ada vs. Abramović', 2018
                    Verbund Collection, Vienna © Hannah Cooke / Bildrecht Vienna 2026

Meanwhile, in Germany, the Goethe University in Frankfurt recently staged an exhibition with the title Who Cares? , which posed the questions ‘who’s taking care of you, and who or what are you taking care of?’ Visitors were invited ‘to explore the concept of care – encompassing caregiving, care work, and mutual responsibility – in new ways’. The exhibition showcased objects from the university’s own collections, ‘ranging from scrapbooks and “housewife” magazines to dried plants, complemented by artistic works created by students from the faculty of art education’.

                                                       Image via uni-frankfurt.de

Given my interest in the language of care (see these posts), I was intrigued to see that both of these exhibitions in German-speaking countries use the English word ‘care’ in their titles. In fact, the Frankfurt exhibition uses both ‘care’ and its German equivalents in its publicity material: the poster reproduced above bears the slogan eine Ausstellung über und mit Fürsorge (‘an exhibition about and with care’), using a German word, but then underneath adds universitäre Sammlungen im Dialog mit Care (‘university collections in dialogue with care’), reverting to the English term.

Besides Fürsorge, the German language has a number of other words for care, including Sorge and Pflege, the latter being used mainly in the context of healthcare. And in the original German of that strapline for the Frankfurt exhibition – ‘who’s taking care of you, and who or what are you taking care of?’ - the verb kümmern is used: as I noted in this post, it has the same root as the word for sorrow or lament, just like the English word ‘care’. Interestingly, the sentence that follows on the exhibition website - Welche Geschichten erzählen Objekte aus universitären Sammlungen über Care und Fürsorge? - uses both the English and German words, as if confirming that they convey subtly different meanings: in fact, Google Translate here renders Fürsorge as ‘solicitude’ rather than ‘care’.

While I was searching online for information about the Who Cares? show, I came across publicity material for another recent exhibition in Frankfurt, which also chose to use the English word ‘care’ in its title. Yes, We Care: Das Neue Frankfurt und die Frage nach dem Gemeinwohl (‘The New Frankfurt and the Question of the Common Good’), at the Museum Angewandte Kunst, focused on the themes of ‘caring for the common good and the provision of essential public services, examining the institutions, associations, individuals, concepts, and initiatives involved during the 1920s.’ The exhibition ‘drew parallels to today’s “care crisis,” which manifests not only in debates regarding the unequal distribution of care work between men and women but also in issues of access to affordable housing and the availability of care services within urban neighbourhoods.’

Once again, it’s interesting that the original German text uses the terms Care-Krise and Care-Arbeit for ‘care crisis’ and ‘care work’ respectively. A later sentence goes on to explain why the English word ‘care’ might be preferable in this context. Here’s the German original:

Der Begriff „Care“ meint Pflege und Fürsorge, aber auch Betreuung, Sorgfalt und Obacht. „Care“ hat eine zwischenmenschliche und zugleich eine sozialpolitische Dimension. „Care“ schließt immer die anderen mit ein, ganz gleich, wer sie sind und wie viele.

And here’s an approximate English translation:

The term ‘care’ encompasses nursing [Pflege] and welfare [Fürsorge] but also supervision [Betreuung], attentiveness [Sorgfalst], and looking out for others [Obacht]. ‘Care’ has both an interpersonal and a socio-political dimension. It always involves other people - regardless of who they are or how many there are.

Although care ethics is not explicitly referenced here, the emphasis on attentiveness and on the socio-political dimension of care clearly owes a debt to the the work of care ethicists like Joan Tronto who have explored care as both a moral disposition and a political imperative. It’s precisely because the English word ‘care’ has acquired these distinctive connotations that scholars working in other languages have often made the deliberate decision to use it in preference to equivalents in their native tongues (see, for example, the ground-breaking book Qu’est-ce que le care? by French scholars Pascale Molinier, Sandra Laugier and Patricia Paperman, published 25 years ago this year).

                                                Image via london.sciencegallery.com

Closer to home, another exhibition exploring the art of care, which closed just a few days ago, was the regular annual show of creative work by medical students, at the Science Gallery in London. The Art of Care 2026 presented ‘creative reflections on care, community, and clinical learning’ by second-year medical students from King’s College London, produced during their year-long GP placements, which offered them ‘a unique insight into the everyday realities that shape health, illness, and access to care’. Supported by clinicians and artists, ‘students responded to their experiences through a wide range of creative media - including painting, sculpture, poetry, photography, film, and interactive work’. The exhibition explored themes such as ‘multiculturalism in healthcare, living with chronic illness, and digital and social barriers faced by vulnerable communities.’

The initiative provides encouraging evidence of the growing interest among health professionals in medical humanities, an interdisciplinary field which connects medicine with the arts, philosophy and social sciences, helping clinicians to understand and embrace the human and cultural aspects of illness. Although the exhibition has now ended, its website is still ‘live’ and features insights from some of the students who participated, together with illustrations of their creative work. For example, Ayesha Irfan Syeda writes that ‘this experience has taught me that being a future doctor means more than diagnosing or treating - it means listening with humility, recognising silence as a symptom, and creating a space where people feel safe enough to speak their truths.’ Another student, Max Powell, comments that by taking part in the project ‘I’ve come to understand that truly caring for a person means looking beyond their diagnosis - to their mind, their environment, and the communities that sustain them. This perspective has reshaped how I understand medicine, grounding it in empathy, understanding, and respect for the whole person.’

            Herne Hill Group Practice - ‘To Be Carried: Illness, Ageing, and the Life Between’ 
                                                       (Max Powell’s project)

Also in London, and continuing until February 2027, the Wellcome Collection - a free museum and library near Euston station - is showing an exhibition entitled Intimacies of Care - Spaces of Grief and Possibility, featuring the work of multidisciplinary artist Rudy Loewe, which ‘reimagines a mental healthcare system that is equitable and supportive’. The exhibition deploys ‘a network of sculptures, paintings, text-based work and sound’ to ‘centre the lived experience of Black people whose mental healthcare in the UK is shaped by racist discrimination.’ The works featured ‘ask us to consider more hopeful, empathetic, alternative approaches to care’.

Finally, I’m pleased to be able to publicise an exhibition that opened just a few days ago and looks like it will be well worth a visit. I’ve mentioned the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester here before: it’s home to the Care Lab, an organisation that explores ‘artful, creative care’, hosting regular seminars and workshops, as part of the Care Aesthetics Research Exploration (CARE) Project led by James Thompson.

                                            Image via whitworth.manchester.ac.uk

On 1st August the Whitworth, in partnership with Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, launched The Labour of Care, a year-long exhibition dedicated to ‘centring the voices and experiences of midwives and maternity healthcare professionals’. It features ‘artworks that explore care, labour and emotional resilience at the frontline of maternal health, providing insights into the realities of working in maternity services at a time of growing pressure on the profession’.

The exhibition developed from Still Care, a pioneering programme of artist-led workshops that began at the Whitworth in 2023 and which aims to ‘create space for maternity staff to pause, reflect and reconnect beyond the demands of the clinical environment’. It features new artworks created by healthcare professionals in their workshop sessions, side-by-side with selected works from the Whitworth’s own internationally renowned collection, placing participants’ lived experiences in dialogue with established artists such as Marina Abramović (mentioned above) and L.S. Lowry.

The painting used for the exhibition poster (above) is ‘Study for Ultrasound’ (2021) by Scottish artist Caroline Walker, a number of whose pictures, from her ‘Birth Reflections’ series, are featured in the show. Walker’s artistic work formed the focus of an exhibition earlier this year at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, entitled Mothering, which explored ‘the beauty, strength, and unseen labour of childcare’.

                                             Caroline Walker, ‘Night Feed 1’, 2022 

     © Caroline Walker GRIMM, Amsterdam/New York/London; Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh; 
                                     and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York.

In their diverse and distinctive ways, all of the exhibitions that I’ve mentioned in this post offer evidence of a growing interest among artists and galleries in care as a vital and important subject for creative exploration. The work of the featured artists demonstrates the ways in which the visual arts can not only sensitively represent the experience of caregiving and being cared for, but also provide powerful vehicles for advancing and deepening our understanding of care as an embodied social practice.

If you’ve come across other exhibitions that focus on care, wherever they are in the world, please let me know, and I’ll promote them in future posts.

In other news…

Congratulations to legal scholar and care theorist Ira Chadha-Sridhar, currently a Junior Research Fellow at Cambridge University, on her appointment to a permanent post as Assistant Professor in Law at the University of Warwick. Ira, who was my guest in Episode 15 of the Careful Thinking podcast, and whom I had the pleasure of meeting in person in Cambridge at the end of last year, is one of the rising stars of contemporary care scholarship: I’m looking forward to her forthcoming book on Care and the Medical Mandate of Law.

And finally…

The Careful Thinking podcast is taking a break during August, but will return in early September with a new monthly series of conversations with writers, researchers and practitioners at the cutting edge of current thinking about care. Watch this space for updates.

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The header image for this post is a photograph of the Intimacies of Care - Spaces of Grief and Possibility exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, London.

CERC26 - the 2026 conference of the international Care Ethics Research Consortium - took place last month at Korea University in Seoul. It was the fourth conference organised by the consortium, and the first to be held in Asia. I wasn’t able to be there in person, but I contributed to the online conference that took place in parallel to the face-to-face event.

By all accounts, the conference was a great success. I’m grateful to Maurice Hamington (my guest in Episode 6 of the Careful Thinking podcast) for sending me the following report:

Formed in 2017, the Care Ethics Research Consortium (CERC) has held conferences roughly every two years since 2018: Portland State University, USA: 2018; University of Ottawa and Carleton University, Canada: 2021 (delayed and online because of COVID); University of Humanistic Studies, Netherlands (2025); Korea University, South Korea (2026).

This year’s conference in Seoul was themed ‘Reconfiguring Relations: Political, Ecological, and Cultural’. It featured the work of Asian care scholars and representatives from 25 countries, held in both in-person and online formats over 3 days, June 25 to 27. Although well-established care theorists such as Joan Tronto, Yayo Okano, Hee-Kang Kim, Tula Brannelly, Helen Kohlen, Brunella Casalini, Rikka Prattes, and Sophie Bourgault presented, the conference’s ethos was enriched by up-and-coming scholars from India, Japan, China, Italy, Canada, Korea, and elsewhere. There was an energy of care in the meetings that revealed the subject to be more than an academic field of study but a practice these scholars engaged in.

                                                                  Hee-Kang Kim

Conference host Hee-Kang Kim did a masterful job of organising the conference, paying attention to every detail. She assembled a team of students who were visible throughout the conference, ensuring that it ran smoothly. Special panels included ‘Cultural Perspectives,’ which featured Muslim, Indian, and Chinese papers on care (Sarah Munawar, Priya Sharma, Ning Zhao); ‘Political Perspectives’, which addressed democratic care in action from Japanese, Korean, and Australian contexts (Yayo Okano, Hee-Kang Kim, and Tito Ambyo); and the final special panel, ‘Ecological Perspectives,’ where Tula Brannelly employed Māori cultural practices to help participants in the room understand the migrant histories of one another. It was a perfect ending to a conference that featured scholarship and caring collegiality. The youthful and diverse nature of the conference presenters left everyone hopeful and energised about the future of care studies.

Maurice is being unduly modest in not including himself in the list of ‘well-established’ care theorists who spoke at the conference. Listeners to the Careful Thinking podcast will have noticed the names of two other podcast guests - Sarah Munawar (Episode 13) and Priya Sharma (Episode 18) - in Maurice’s report. Iris Parra Jounou (my guest in Episode 27) also presented in person, as did Pragya Dev, whom I interviewed for this Substack post. And Ira Chadha-Sridhar, my guest for Episode 15 of the podcast, was (like me) among the speakers at the online conference.

    Maurice Hamington, Pragya Dev, Iris Parra Jounou, Sophie Bourgault and Priya Sharma, 
                     with other conference attendees in Seoul (photo courtesy of Maurice)

The theme of this year’s conference was fairly broad and allowed for a wide diversity of presentations. However, there was a definite emphasis in many of the papers on the ecological dimensions of care, and that was certainly one of the themes of my own contribution to the online conference. My talk, which was part of a session on ‘Creative Practice, Relational Care, and Global Ecology’, had as its title ‘From care to the person to care for the world: gender, ecology, and co-existence’, and in it I set out to explore the ways in which interpersonal care and care at the social, political and ecological levels are connected.

The paper had its origins in an exchange I had some time ago with the Czech philosopher and care theorist Petr Urban, who was my guest in Episode 4 of the podcast. Petr is someone whose work has been an enormous influence on my own thinking, and over the years we’ve had many fruitful exchanges, both online and in person. In particular, I’ve found Petr’s writings about the relevance for care ethics of the German-Jewish philosopher and Catholic convert, Edith Stein, extremely helpful, speaking as someone who identifies strongly with the personalist philosophy that Stein – along with other thinkers, such as Dietrich von Hildebrand, Karol Wojtyla and particularly Gabriel Marcel - embodies. But I was somewhat taken aback by the following paragraph in Petr’s article on ‘Care Ethics and the Feminist Personalism of Edith Stein’ (this quotation, like the others reproduced below, is taken from the slides for my presentation):

The quotations in the extract are from Joan Tronto’s classic text Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethics of Care. Naturally, I’ve been aware of the fascinating scholarly work that’s emerging which applies the principles of care ethics to the non-human and the natural world. But perhaps naively I’d assumed that, at its heart, care ethics remained concerned with interpersonal human relations, and that it was rooted in an understanding of the transcendent value of the human person. Petr’s article made me wonder whether an increasing emphasis on the ecological dimensions of care – the ‘complex, life-sustaining web’ - and the drive to develop a ‘non-anthropocentric environmental ethics’ – might threaten this sense of the unique value of the human person which has certainly been at the heart of my own thinking about care.

                                                            Jacqui Wilmshurst

If that was one of the origins of the paper at a personal level, then another has been the experience of supervising a doctoral student who is seeking to apply care ethics to human-animal relationships. Jacqui Wilmshurst, a psychologist by training, runs a sanctuary in Yorkshire, England, for squirrels and corvids who are unable to return to the wild. Her research explores her own care for the animals and the implications for thinking about relationships of care between humans, animals and the natural world. Working with Jacqui has introduced me to thinkers on care for the ‘more-than-human’ of whose work I was previously unaware and has challenged my own exclusive focus on human interpersonal care.

These and other recent experiences prompted the questions that I set out to explore in the paper:

How are interpersonal care and care for the Earth connected?

Can developing a habit of care at the interpersonal level cultivate concern for the wider community and the planet, or does an ecological ethic of care undermine an emphasis on the unique value of the human person?

And how might the feminist resources of care ethics aid an understanding of the connection between gender equality and ecological co-existence?

I began by setting out three main ways in which we might understand the connections between interpersonal care and care at the social, political and ecological levels:

The first I described as practical or pragmatic connections. For example, an experience of caring at an interpersonal level can lead to a realisation of the need for a broader infrastructure to support that care. So for purely pragmatic reasons, the caregiver may become invested in the wider care needs of their community and be prompted to participate in collective efforts to improve political and legal structures to support care. There may also be a realisation that one’s interpersonal relations of care depend indirectly on the wellbeing of the natural world, and conversely may be threatened by climate change or other ecological crises. As an example of this pragmatic level of connection, I quoted something disability scholar Melody Escobar, who has researched the experiences of mothers of disabled children (including her own), said in Episode 22 of the podcast:

The second kind of connection I described as psychological, though perhaps ‘embodied’ might have been a better word. Maurice Hamington has written, in his 2004 book on Embodied Care and elsewhere, about the ways in which our bodies know ‘habitual activities of care’, arguing that ‘these are not instinctual activities but learned (and learning) behaviours that exhibit care’. In other words, the very experience of caregiving can become imprinted on the body and develop a habit that persists beyond that localised experience, having the capacity to extend beyond the merely personal to the social, political and ecological levels. To illustrate this kind of connection, I quoted something James Thompson, author of the ground-breaking book Care Aesthetics: For Artful Care and Careful Art, said in Episode 11 of the podcast:

The third kind of connection I proposed in the paper was a philosophical one. Many philosophical and spiritual traditions maintain that there is a deep connection between care for one other and care for the natural world. We see this in the Judeo-Christian tradition, with its ethical imperative (not often observed in historical practice, it has to be said) to care for God’s creation, to be stewards of the natural world. Examples of this would be the spirituality of Francis of Assisi and, in contemporary terms, the late Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato si’.

But other philosophical traditions have also articulated a deep sense of connection between the personal and the ecological. In Buddhism and other Asian spiritual traditions, there is a sense that all living things are interconnected and interdependent, and that therefore compassion should be extended beyond the human to all beings. And in recent years, there has been work in care ethics, and particularly in decolonial care theory, highlighting ideas and practices of care in indigenous cultures which emphasise ecological interdependence. My example to illustrate this came from some words of an elder of the Cree nation that are quoted in Maurice Hamington’s recent book Revolutionary Care:

In the second part of my conference talk, I highlighted the work of two contemporary feminist philosophers who, in my view, make interesting and original connections between interpersonal and ecological care.

Corine Pelluchon is a French philosopher whose work is well-known in France, and to some extent in mainstream philosophical circles elsewhere, but as yet little discussed in the context of care ethics. This may be partly because she is often critical of care ethics, preferring to define her perspective instead as ‘une éthique de la considération’ or ‘de la vulnérabilité’. Nevertheless, I believe that her writing makes an important contribution to thinking about ways of connecting interpersonal and ecological care. In her work Pelluchon has developed a distinctive ethic which is at once personal, political and ecological, and which has particularly emphasised the need for an ethic which takes account of the needs of animals and the natural world. I used the following quotes from Pelluchon’s writings to illustrate some of her key ideas:

The other thinker whose work I highlighted was Irene Comins Mingol, the Spanish philosopher whom I interviewed for this Substack post. Unlike Pelluchon, Comins Mingol acknowledges an explicit debt to feminist care ethics, and particularly the work of thinkers like Carol Gilligan and Nell Noddings. Her work has focused on exploring the potential of an ethic of care for the promotion of peace and of human and environmental co-existence: una ética del cuidado de la Tierra.

Much of Irene’s recent work has emphasised the need to transcend current gender relations and promote caring masculinities, if progress is to be made towards peace and ecological co-existence. These quotations are from my interview with Irene:

I find the ideas of these two thinkers intriguing and they have certainly challenged and extended my own thinking about care. I would argue that their work embodies in innovative ways the kinds of connection between care at the interpersonal and the ecological levels that I set out above, exploring practical, psychological, and in particular philosophical connections: both thinkers draw on Eastern philosophy in their writing, Pelluchon acknowledging a debt to Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō and Comins Mingol to Taoism.

I began my presentation by saying that the paper grew out of a personal quest to find connections between my own preferred personalist philosophy of care, and the need for a broader ecological vision. I ended my talk with an admission that I hadn’t yet come to any firm conclusions, and that for me this is still work in progress, but I left my audience with three questions to think about, in the hope of provoking further discussion:

Does the practice of interpersonal care always and inevitably lead to a commitment to care at the social/political/ ecological level - or is that unduly optimistic?

Can we advance an ecological ethic of care without blurring the distinction between the human and the non-human?

Is it possible to both retain a sense of the human person as the highest value and develop an ecological ethic of care that is free from any sense of domination or exploitation?

Please feel free to add your own thoughts in the comments!

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The next conference of the Care Ethics Research Consortium will take place in 2028 and will be hosted by Estela Roselló Soberón and colleagues at UNAM, the National Autonomous University of Mexico. I’ll post further details here when they become available.

…

In other news…

A few months ago, I interviewed Zechariah Mickel, author of The Unthinkable Sacrifice: an Essay on Fatherhood, for Episode 28 of the Careful Thinking podcast. Zech’s book draws on his experience as the father of two young daughters, and at the time of our conversation, he and his wife were anticipating the imminent arrival of another child. I’m happy to report that they now have a third daughter – Josephine – and that mother and baby are doing well. Congratulations!

I was also delighted when Zech asked if he could cross-post our conversation to The Theology Mill, the podcast that he hosts at Wipf and Stock Publishers. That episode is now available and you can listen to it here.

…

The header image for this post is a photograph of contributors to the in-person CERC26 conference in Seoul in June 2026 (via Hee-Kang Kim).

For Episode 31 of the Careful Thinking podcast, I was delighted – and honoured – to welcome as my guest Eva Feder Kittay, one of the key figures in the development of feminist care ethics. Eva, who is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Philosophy at Stony Brook University in New York State, is also a major voice in the emergent field of the philosophy of disability.

Love’s Labor: Essays on Women and Equality, which Eva published in 1999, was a ground-breaking work in feminist philosophy and remains one of the foundational texts of care ethics. Many of my previous podcast guests have cited the book as a formative influence on their thinking about care.

Eva’s work has been shaped in part by her experience as the mother of Sesha, a woman with significant disabilities, and in 2019 she published Learning from My Daughter: The Value and Care of Disabled Minds. The book was the winner of the 2020 PROSE Award for Excellence in Philosophy and has recently been issued in paperback.

Our conversation on the podcast was wide-ranging, beginning with Eva’s experience of growing up as the daughter of Holocaust survivors in 1950s America, and moving on to her introduction to feminism and political activism in the 1960s and 1970s. Eva explained how her feminist beliefs, combined with her experience as the mother of a disabled child, led to her philosophical interest in issues of dependency and care, and to the writing of Love’s Labor. We discussed some of the main issues covered by the book, including Eva’s insistence that caregivers should be seen as ‘dependency workers’, ‘the de-gendering’ of care, and her introduction of the concept of doulia, as a way of emphasising that caregivers themselves need care, and should be properly supported by society and by public policy.

Moving on to Learning from My Daughter, we talked about its distinctive combination of highly personal and at the same time rigorously philosophical writing. Eva argued that the experience of disabled people like Sesha should prompt us to reconsider what we understand by a ‘normal’ or a ‘good life’. Our conversation circled back to care ethics and to the continuing tension between autonomy and care in the study of disability. Eva insisted that care needs to be ‘completed’ by being received. Our conversation ended, as the book does, with Eva’s beautiful meditation on Sesha’s body as a window on her soul.

There were numerous points of connection between my conversation with Eva and previous episodes of the Careful Thinking podcast. In one of the earliest episodes, Xavier Symons and I discussed the question of personhood in the context of dementia, drawing on Eva’s insistence on relationality rather than rationality as the basis of what constitutes the human person, a subject that I returned to in my conversation with my Open University colleague Vince Mitchell in a later episode. Eva’s suggestion that the future for disabled people might lie in self-organising communities of care, rather than reliance on top-down state support, echoed the work both of Lorraine Krall McCrary, my guest in Episode 23 of the podcast, and my recent Substack interview with Argentinian disability theorist Diego Carmona Gallego, who cited Eva’s work as an important influence on his own research.

I was intrigued by Eva’s admission that her thinking about the role of the state in relation to care had changed over time, and by her claim that she had ‘never really thought that the state would be the only form of doulia’. It was as though she was responding to Catholic legal scholar Erika Bachiochi’s criticism, expressed in her conversation with me in Episode 26 of the podcast, that Kittay ‘wants to right away go to the modern state’ as the default provider of care. And I found Eva’s declaration that we should ‘keep the state pretty far away from the actual dependency relationships themselves’ both surprising and refreshing, echoing as it did some of the arguments I put forward in this post.

It was an enormous privilege - and pleasure - to finally meet Eva, if only online, and to spend time discussing her important work in such detail. I’ve found re-engaging with her writing, and in particular her eloquent reflections on her life with Sesha in Learning from my Daughter, both intellectually challenging and at the same time deeply moving.

I’ve included a few extracts from the episode below, but I’d warmly recommending listening to the whole interview:

I loved doing philosophy of language...But then I went to a conference that had caught my eye and intrigued me, because it was on philosophy and ‘mental retardation’, which was the term of art of the day. And it was quite shocking to me to have all these philosophers there gathered, talking about mental retardation, when they seemed to me not to know a thing about it. It was completely different than my experience of living with my daughter. And I realised then that I had to start writing about Sesha, and I had to start informing these folks of what the phenomenon they had thought they were talking about was really about.

...

One question that occupied me was why most feminist attempts to attack mainstream political and ethical theories...seemed to fall short...And I felt they were not really getting at the heart of the way women were excluded. And that’s when my thinking about Sesha and care came together...And I realised that once you started caring for a dependent person, especially a dependent person who is almost totally dependent, like a young child or my Sesha, you had to become dependent on others for the care of yourself and the person you were caring for. And that meant that the women who cared for dependents couldn’t be the free, equal, independent actors that political philosophy took as a given. So it highlighted the importance of human dependency and its inevitability, and its exclusion in the thinking about political philosophy, about ethics, and the importance of it in the lives of each of us. Since I was living with a dependent...I learned a lot about dependency. And I also needed help from others to care for her. And so I learned a lot about what caregiving is.

...

So this idea of supporting the new mother, that idea I thought would be the idea of doulia as an extension of a public feminist ethic of care. And it’s the extension of the idea that when we care for another who’s unable to care for herself, the carer needs care. But that caring relationship is nested in another relationship of support. But the person who’s supporting them is also in a relationship that requires support. So it’s these nesting relations of dependency that I think are the basis of our society...I mean, if we didn’t need each other in this way, we would all be like the Rousseau natural man, each individual seeking our own sustenance, walking about the forest, not meeting anyone else. But we need each other because we need care.

...

I think the one thing that’s changed in my mind [since writing Love’s Labor] is the recognition of the possibility of caring communities. That is, that people who need care can also sometimes be carers for others who need care. And this is a notion that disability advocates have talked a lot about. And also people of colour who are much more suspicious of the state as a good actor...And so there need to be more ways of thinking of how to organise doulia. And you know, I don’t know what those would be, and caring communities seem to have limitations. Disabled people caring for each other often do need a non-disabled person around who can help in certain ways. So there’s an important struggle to engage in and something to puzzle through that tension, between insisting on support and seeing to it that there is non-domination on the part of those who give support. How to keep power in the right places and out of the wrong places...I never really thought that the state would be the only form of doulia, but I thought it would be the ultimate form of doulia. But that might not be good given the structure of power.

...

Between the time I wrote Love’s Labor and the time I wrote Lessons from My Daughter, I learned a great deal more about disability. So that’s something that informed me not just about Sesha’s particular disability, but living a life of disability. So I think when we look at our children…who don’t exhibit serious impairments and think of perfection or promise or talent, and in our own lives we struggle for meaning, and Sesha strips all of this away. Struggle at times, for sure, but it’s a struggle to keep a bright light shining. We can enjoy talents and intelligence, but the purity of being with her, seeing her take so much joy, particularly in music and really complicated music, to take all that joy, despite all the many limitations, she has many limitations, but it has a profound effect on an understanding of what a good life is. She has a good life, for all her difficulties. She has a good life because she can find joy. And it reveals what is behind the joy we feel in our children, in our work, if we’re lucky. And the reason, as I said, is to take the next breath, despite all the awful things that are happening in the world, where we find ourselves so powerless to affect these things. But that ability to find that spark of joy, it’s just profound when you’re with her.

You can listen to the whole episode here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can download a transcript of the episode here:

Careful Thinking Eva Kittay Episode 31 Transcript

359KB ∙ PDF file

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The header image is a photograph of Eva Kittay with her daughter Sesha (via)

In this post, I’m publishing another of my Substack interviews, which act as a kind of supplement to the Careful Thinking podcast. My interviewee on this occasion is Diego Carmona Gallego, an Argentinian researcher, currently working in Spain, whose work focuses on disability and the ethics of care. Interestingly, Diego has worked in the past with Spanish philosopher Irene Comins Mingol, whose interview I posted here last year.

Diego has a Master’s degree in Health Psychology from the National University of Rosario in Argentina and a doctorate in Social Sciences from the National University of Entre Ríos. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina (CONICET) and is a member of the Argentine Network of Health Care Research (RAICES). He has been a guest professor at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, the University of Granada, the National University of Entre Ríos, and the National University of Córdoba. He is currently a postgraduate professor and health psychologist at ASPAYM, the Association of People with Spinal Cord Injuries and Physical Disabilities, in Granada.

Diego, who is a regular listener to the podcast, contacted me earlier this year to let me know about his research, which challenges the notion of ‘independence’ in disability studies, which he sees as reflecting a neoliberal ideal of self-sufficiency, and about his work developing a theory of ‘interdependent autonomy’. To date, Diego’s research has been published only in Spanish, but I believe it deserves a wider audience, so I was pleased that he accepted my invitation to be interviewed.

As I noted in a post last year, there’s a tendency for work in care theory that isn’t published in English to be overlooked or marginalised. It’s also the case that research on care from Latin America is still not very well known elsewhere (even if, thanks to reporting by Mélina Magdelénat and others, some of the innovative care-related policy developments on that continent are becoming better known), so I was pleased to be able to offer this insight into the work of Diego and other researchers with whom he is connected in Argentina. I’m grateful to Diego for taking the time to provide such full and thoughtful answers to my questions.

Diego’s research has clear connections with the work of a number of guests who have featured on the Careful Thinking podcast. I’m thinking particularly of Aaron Jackson’s research with fathers of disabled children, Melody Escobar’s study of the experiences of mothers of children with disabilities, and Lorraine Krall McCrary’s investigation of ‘caring communities’ organised by and for disabled people, while the themes of autonomy, dependency and interdependence which Diego explores have been the focus of many of my podcast interviews and posts on this site. Diego offers a fresh Latin American perspective on these issues as both a practitioner and a theorist of care.

      Diego Carmona Gallego speaking at the II Congreso Internacional de Ética Profesional, 
                                             Universidad de Granada, 2024

Diego, can I begin by asking you about your personal background and how it led to the work you’re doing now? Can you say something about your childhood and your education, and how you developed an interest in health psychology, and then in intellectual disability?

I grew up in a working-class environment in Ciudad de Gálvez, located in the central region of Argentina. I was raised in a home without books or university-educated professionals, and I am truly who I am today thanks to Argentine public and tuition-free education, having been fortunate to have excellent teachers at every educational level.

While the theoretical value of pursuing a degree was recognised at home and by my teachers, the everyday reality of my school environment was quite different. My peers weren’t particularly focused on academics, yet they, along with my parents, always supported me and genuinely recognised my efforts. Charting this path required some independence, but the desire to discover the world beyond my hometown gave me the strength to naturally gravitate towards reading, learning, and the habit of asking questions. During my teenage years, I discovered that literature was a way to broaden my horizons. This passion for books, coupled with my admiration for certain people, led me to choose psychology, a profession I truly love.

               Diego’s primary school, Escuela Mariano Moreno 6035, in Ciudad de Gálvez

My first job was in the field of intellectual disability, and I ended up there quite by chance. I needed a job at the time, and a very good friend of mine recommended I send my CV to a residential home with a day centre for adults with intellectual disabilities. Once there, an entire world opened up to me. I had never planned on working in this sector, but it was a formative experience that left a lasting mark on me. My contact with institutionalised individuals led me to develop a critical perspective regarding the institutional logics that curtail rights and de-subjectify people, treating them as ‘non-persons’.

This constant reflection on my professional practice later drove me towards research. Therefore, my research is neither a theoretical abstraction nor a speculative exercise. I aim for it to have concrete consequences and a direct impact on the day-to-day lives of people with disabilities, both inside and outside institutional settings.

On the other hand, in that first job I discovered that by building relationships based on autonomy, listening, and trust, I could be more spontaneous and fun than I used to be. This meant that, despite the emotional toll typical of Goffman’s ‘total institutions’, I felt revitalised thanks to our collective work and the use of humour. A clear example of this was the creation of the ZL poetry magazine, a project I spearheaded alongside my colleagues. Through it, we managed to bring together resident writers with established or external authors, sharing not only a common purpose but also journeys together. I particularly remember a stay in Buenos Aires which involved living closely together; it was inspiring to work from a place of care and trust within the network we were building, entirely removed from any logic of surveillance or control.

You’ve worked in both Argentina and Spain: can you give an outline of your career to date, and also talk about where you’re working now?

Following that initial role, from 2018 onwards, I worked alongside Dr Claudia Perlo within the research group on learning and organisational development at IRICE (the Rosario Institute of Research in Educational Sciences), a centre affiliated with the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) and the National University of Rosario. Claudia is a teacher in the deepest sense of the word; to me, she represents wisdom and a profound commitment to society in the way she approaches research. I simply could not have loved this research path without her guidance. This stage provided an enormous boost to my career; it allowed me to complete my PhD in Social Sciences and train as a researcher within a team of excellence. CONICET ranks as the number one governmental research institution in Latin America. Its entry process is highly transparent and exceptionally demanding, which provided me with a very solid methodological foundation. Thanks to this, I have been able to serve as a guest lecturer at various universities and share my research with highly diverse
stakeholders, ranging from people with intellectual disabilities and their families to sector professionals and academics.

Through this work, I was awarded the scholarship for young researchers from Latin America by the Coimbra Group (a consortium of European universities), which brought me to Spain. I completed my research stay at the University of Granada and, concurrently, I was invited by the International University of La Rioja (UNIR) to update the syllabus, content, and teaching materials for two modules within their BSc in Psychology.

Currently, I live in Granada with my family and work at an association dedicated to individuals with spinal cord injuries and physical disabilities. There, I provide psychological therapy in a clinical setting to people with various types of disabilities (physical, intellectual, and psychosocial) as well as to their family carers. In this same space, I teach courses focused on social and labour inclusion. I combine this work with my ongoing role in my research group in Argentina, where I serve actively as an external, honorary co-director.

I was interested to learn that you’ve worked with Irene Comins Mingol, whose work I really admire, and who I’ve also interviewed for this Substack. Can you say something about your connection with Irene?

Irene welcomed me most warmly during a short stay I undertook at the Universitat Jaume I in 2021. Her work has been a fundamental source of inspiration for the formulation of my research problems since 2018. Her approach to the ethics of care as a pillar of peace education is decisive in the face of contemporary challenges, thanks to a highly lucid and enlightening manner of transmission. When I met her in person, we discussed the urgency of linking masculinities with care; we agreed that, although the research agenda focuses mostly on gender inequalities in the division of domestic chores, it often overlooks the importance of a subjective transformation of traditional masculinity based on the feminist ethics of care.

Furthermore, her work is key to conceiving alternative approaches to situations of violence. This theme emerged in my doctoral thesis from one of the cases I investigated in the north-west district of Rosario (Argentina), an area heavily afflicted by armed violence and drug trafficking. Irene’s approach is incredibly powerful because it resonates with Emmanuel Levinas’ idea of peace: that it is not the mere absence of war, but rather the awakening to the precariousness of the other. It implies, therefore, recognising vulnerability as an inherent mark of the human condition. In this sense, it is worth recalling the distinction made by Mackenzie, Rogers, and Dodds regarding the uses of this term: beyond its most frequent meaning, linked to the study of the effects of inequalities, there is a dimension of vulnerability understood as the ontological exposure to being affected in our encounters with others. Within this framework, Irene’s proposal provides a multidimensional vision of care - encompassing care of the self, of others, and of nature - articulated with an education that strives for peace and an inescapable commitment to social equality.

                                                             Irene Comins Mingol

I know that you’re part of a research network in Argentina, which includes researchers like Alfonsina Angelino and Carlos Cullen. Can you say something about that network and the work of these other researchers?

In Argentina, I am part of the Argentine Network for Research into Healthcare (Red Argentina de Investigaciones de Cuidados en Salud), a space where researchers such as María Cristina Chardón come together. Her work is highly interesting because it recovers contributions from psychoanalysis, particularly from the Argentine analyst Fernando Ulloa. From this perspective, with which I closely align, care requires a bond capable of accommodating the other. To accommodate implies granting a subjective place to the person being cared for, recognising them in their uniqueness, and avoiding treating them as a mere ‘object’ of assistance. Furthermore, the tenderness that care entails on many occasions acts as a form of resistance against socially installed mechanisms of cruelty, which are fundamentally based on indifference to the suffering of others. This is the politics of the inhospitable; that is to say, the absence of the ultimate gesture of an ethics of care: hospitality.

This perspective on care finds a fundamental echo in the works of Alfonsina Angelino and Carlos Cullen. In Angelino’s case, her work demonstrates a profound commitment to disability collectives and, specifically, to mother-carers. Her work was the first approach I read concerning the ethics of care, and I consider her to be the most important contemporary authority on the subject within the Argentine context. Although her background is in social work, her approach is markedly transdisciplinary and foundational. Her research has made visible how numerous mothers deploy a labour of resistance to prevent their children’s lives from becoming encapsulated within a clinical diagnosis or a predefined circuit of socialisation and specialised treatments. This resistance to the de-subjectivation of their children, combined with her sharp reflection on how patriarchy and capitalism privatise, depoliticise, and feminise tasks of assistance, configures an inescapable theoretical framework for the contemporary study of care.

On the other hand, the work of Carlos Cullen offers a rigorous philosophical reflection that deepens the understanding of ethics from a matrix situated in Latin America. His proposal lends conceptual density to the comprehension of care as hospitality. On this point, it is relevant to recover the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, which Cullen articulates with the thought of Latin American authors such as Rodolfo Kusch. This genealogy is key to conceiving care beyond mere assistance; for Cullen, care is defined as any experience of welcoming that opposes domination and de-subjectivation. As he aptly points out in a phrase from his book Ética, ¿dónde habitas? (Ethics, Where Do You Dwell?): ‘ethics is a retreat into the silence of morals’. To the extent that we are able to temporarily suspend the normative codes that each era imposes as a duty-to-be, we can unburden ourselves of institutional imperatives to remain more attentive to real bonds and their unique needs.

       L to R: Claudia Perlo, María Cristina Chardón, Alfonsina Angelino, Carlos Cullen

In your writing, you make reference to a wide range of thinkers from various intellectual traditions, including some of the key names in care ethics, but also theorists like the Brazilian philosopher and theologian Leonard Boff, who has also influenced Irene. What would you say have been the main intellectual influences on your thinking? Who are some of the thinkers and writers on disability, and on care, who have most influenced you?

The analytic perspective constitutes a permanent source of reflection for me, dating back to my training at the National University of Rosario. Psychoanalysis brought about a revolutionary epistemological shift: the transition from a medical gaze to analytic listening produces a qualitative leap that demands accommodating the unique history of the subject and their specific relationship with suffering.

On the other hand, the thought of Edgar Morin has been key to distinguishing the nuances between critical and complex thinking. Complexity accommodates the possibility of holding contradiction simultaneously with complementarity. His critique of linear causality, characteristic of the mechanistic paradigm, has been a pillar for the development of my doctoral thesis and subsequent research. Thinking in terms of feedback loops, non-linear causalities, and uncertainty is indispensable for designing ways of practising care that do not lapse into instrumental models. I have addressed this axis in several articles; in a recent one, for instance, I examine the tensions between a mechanistic model of care based on security and a complex perspective that situates care in relation to the assumption of uncertainties within relationships. In other words, caring does not imply surveillance or pretending to know everything about others, since - recalling Levinas - it is not so much about knowing as it is about accommodating alterity.

In this trajectory, Leonardo Boff is my main reference when studying care. Indeed, his contributions prompted encounters with other Argentine researchers, such as Esteban Kipen, Leticia Costa, Vanesa Aparicio, and Marcelo Marmet. Boff understands care as something beyond an isolated act: he defines it as an attitude of occupation, preoccupation, responsibility, and affective commitment. In terms of research, this premise opens up a direct debate with the mainstream literature, which often reduces care to a mere task or technical provision. Without disregarding its practical dimension, Boff’s work focuses on care as an attitude that is cultivated socially, and one which we must strengthen to build an alternative paradigm founded on care for the Earth. His influence on my thought is decisive. In his book Essential Care: An Ethics of Human Nature, Compassion for the Earth, he notes that care is a way of relating that is not based on dominion over the other, but rather on con-vivencia (living-with). For this reason, it is not pure intervention, but interaction and communion.

This way of conceiving care has also challenged my own methodological practice. If conducting research from the perspective of traditional analytical reason often becomes an extractivist practice - aimed at extracting data to better understand an object of study - researching from the standpoint of the ethics of care implies questioning this logic and its associated mechanisms in order to commit to a convivencia alongside the people with whom we investigate.

                                                                     Leonardo Boff

Furthermore, my perspective draws on the most prominent Anglophone theorists in the ethics of care, such as Carol Gilligan, Eva Feder Kittay, and Joan Tronto. In particular, due to the intersection between disability and care, Kittay proves deeply inspiring by placing the relationship with her daughter Sesha at the living core of her reflection. Reading her idea of ‘nested dependencies’, as well as her understanding of care as an ethical boundary situated between indifference (or abandonment) and paternalism. It is deeply moving to read her because of her conceptual rigour combined with a profoundly embodied writing style. In a complementary line, it has been highly significant for me to train on various occasions with the Argentine epistemologist Denise Najmanovich, whose theoretical insights allowed me to conceptualise the category of receptivity.

In 2020 you published an article with the title ‘Autonomía e interdependencia. La ética del cuidado en la discapacidad’ (‘Autonomy and interdependence: the ethics of care and disability’), in which you critically review the concept of ‘self-sufficient independence’, which is often found in organisations that provide care for people with disabilities, and you discuss the relationship between autonomy, care and independence, drawing in part on the work of care ethicists such as Joan Tronto and Pascale Molinier. Can you give a summary of your main argument in that paper?

In that 2020 article, my central argument is that the traditional concept of ‘independence’ - understood as absolute self-sufficiency or the ability to do everything entirely on one’s own - is a philosophical and practical fiction that ends up marginalising and desubjectifying people with disabilities. Drawing on the work of Joan Tronto and Pascale Molinier, the article develops three main pillars to propose an alternative framework based on relational autonomy:

First, I critically examine the institutional bias toward ‘self-sufficient independence.’ Many care organisations operate under a neoliberal paradigm where autonomy is measured by a person’s ability to minimise their dependence on others. This view reduces care to a mere mechanical transaction whose sole objective is to achieve functional and physical autonomy. When the goal is strictly limited to making the individual independent in a functional sense, institutions overlook the person’s subjective desires and their unique relationship with suffering. True care is thus replaced by a model of surveillance and hyper-regulation.

Secondly, drawing on Joan Tronto’s political ethics of care, I argue that autonomy and dependence are not mutually exclusive. Human beings are inherently vulnerable and interconnected throughout their lives. Therefore, true autonomy for a person with a disability does not mean doing everything alone, but rather having the subjective capacity to make decisions about their own life within a network of supportive relationships. Care should not be a tool for eliminating dependence, but a relational framework that guarantees the right to autonomous decision-making through what I have termed ‘interdependent autonomy.’

A number of your published articles have been based on a research study in central Argentina, at a day centre for adults with intellectual disabilities and a neighbourhood living centre. Can you say something about the work of those centres, and about what your research involved and the methods you used?

My research was based on a purposive sample of two distinct care organisations in central Argentina: a private day centre for adults with intellectual and combined disabilities, and a municipal community centre (designated as a Centro Cuidar since 2022 [1]). Both institutions shared a deep interest in reflecting upon their professional practices and exploring ways to innovate through the lens of the ethics of care.

The day centre is oriented towards social and labour inclusion, where care has historically been professionalised and understood strictly as a technical ‘task’—unilaterally directed from a provider to a recipient defined as ‘dependent’. This case allowed me to analyse how the dominant social imaginary permeates institutional life, often reducing disability to intrinsic frailty and feminising care. Conversely, the community centre operates in a context of social vulnerability. There, care is not framed as a set of discrete tasks, but as a transversal dynamic rooted in hospitality, active listening, and the cultivation of relational bonds between individuals, their communities, and their ecosystems.

Methodologically, the study adopted a qualitative approach. Guided by the principles of grounded theory, the day centre was selected as an evident embodiment of the phenomenon (most development case), while the community centre provided insights into care experienced as a mode of connection. To map and contrast the perceptions and practices within both organisations, I utilised a combination of data collection methods. These included self-administered questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, open and in-depth interviews with management teams, and participant observations. Additionally, I conducted reflective conversation circles (focus groups) with the staff. These circles were inspired by the ‘culture circles’ of the Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire, as they specifically sought the mutual recognition of knowledges and expertise among the participants.

          The ‘Centro Cuidar’ in central Argentina where Diego conducted his research. 
                 Regular readers may be reminded of the header image for this post. 
                                    (Photo courtesy of Diego Carmona Gallego)

Your 2023 article, ‘Percepciones y prácticas de cuidado desde una dimensión ética’ (‘Perceptions and care practices from an ethical dimension’) draws on the findings from that study. As in your 2020 article, you again draw on care theorists such as Gilligan, Tronto, Molinier, Laugier, Comins Mingol and others. You write in the abstract that the results of the study ‘reflect the importance of receptivity to rethink bonds, as well as the need to cultivate a perception of the details of daily life, an aesthetic of circularity and a sense of temporality attentive to organic rhythm.’ I found your discussion of ideas of receptivity, and the notion of an 'aesthetic of circularity’ in this article fascinating. I wonder if you could give a brief summary of your thinking in this paper?

In my 2023 article, my aim was to rescue the power of care as a multidirectional mode of connection, distancing it from the mere unilateral ‘technical task’ imposed by the mechanistic paradigm. Through the analysis of my fieldwork, I demonstrate how moving towards an authentic ethos of care requires an ontological, ethical, and aesthetic shift where the ‘aesthetics of circularity’ emerges as a radical alternative to the pyramidal rigidity of productivism. This circularity is embodied, in the first instance, in the very texture of everyday gestures: authentic care requires concave and convex forms - such as a hug, a caress, or giving hands - capable of accommodating otherness without falling into evasion or crushing. Beyond gestures, the community organisation itself reclaims the circle as the geometric and political form of encounter. There, the circle materialises in the horizontal round, a setting where there are no ‘ups or downs’ and where differences are recognised within a radical equality through dialogue, embodiment, and the co-creation of a collective intimacy.

Furthermore, the studied case highlights that this circularity is inextricably linked to a rhythmic and organic temporality that emulates the cycles of nature - such as inspiration-expiration or circadian periodicity - in opposition to the automatic, factory-like time of assembly-line production. From this perspective, to care implies understanding that life is governed by periodicity and reiteration, but never by the identical repetition characteristic of machines. Registering singular rhythms to bring them into harmony requires giving oneself time and giving others time, demanding a serenity and temporal flexibility that embraces uncertainty against the fiction of absolute control. In this way, the article demonstrates the ethical relevance of the details of ordinary life; it is within the small and apparently unexceptional where people truly experience feeling cared for. In conclusion, the text postulates that, by inhabiting care through community bonds, the circle and the organic rhythm deployed by this organisation - built precisely as a humanising response to contexts fraught with issues of violence - successfully converge to foster instituting practices, moving away from a security-based paradigm focused on external control towards a network of mutual trust, reciprocity, and hospitality.

In 2024 you published another article, based on the same research study, which elaborates on the idea of receptivity. It has the interesting title: ‘Con las zapatillas puestas. Ética del cuidado y discapacidad, la receptividad como resignificación de la actividad’ (‘With sneakers on. Ethics of care and disability, receptivity as a resignification of the activity’). And in this paper you write that the results from the study ‘warn that, from the perspective and experience of some people who work in this context, caring can be both intervening in situations that require it for the people with intellectual disabilities, as well as abstaining from doing so. The practices of abstention or non-intervention reconfigure the importance given to the activity in the theoretical-conceptual delimitations around caring that exist in specialised literature. In this framework, receptivity emerges as a powerful concept to make visible those practices that are not strictly a doing, but however also make up caring.’ Can you explain your argument here, and the importance of ‘abstention or non- intervention’ in care?

The core of this argument is perfectly illustrated by Julián’s everyday situation, as he insists on taking his afternoon nap with his shoes on. Traditionally, institutional dynamics and much of the specialised literature define care exclusively as a task, a constant ‘doing;: intervening, assisting, and imposing order to ensure a predefined ‘quality of life’. From this mechanistic perspective, allowing Julián to sleep in his shoes would be misinterpreted as neglect or abandonment, since, from an external and universal point of view, it is not the most ‘comfortable’ way to rest.

However, genuine care demands an ethic of receptivity, where abstention or non-intervention has fundamental clinical and human value. When professionals decide not to force Julián to take off his shoes, they are not acting out of indifference. Instead, they engage in a conscious and deeply committed ‘non-doing.’ They suspend their own judgments, silence the institutional impulse to ‘fix’ the situation, and refrain from imposing what they believe is best.

This abstention is an active process of ‘letting be.’ It creates a vital space to embrace Julián’s independent will in the face of the imposition of standardised comfort. This receptivity redefines the activity by demonstrating that, to safeguard the right to autonomous decision-making in the context of intellectual disability, sometimes consciously choosing not to intervene can be the highest and most respectful form of care. Naming these practices is fundamental, since many forms of care consist of non-action, and because they are neither visible nor obvious, we risk assuming they don’t exist.

Last year, in 2025, you published a further article from the same research study, but this time based on questionnaires given to staff members at the organisations you were researching. ‘La lógica de la seguridad frente a la dignidad del riesgo: un análisis de las prácticas de cuidado en contextos de atención a personas con discapacidad intelectual’ (‘Safety logic versus the dignity of risk: an analysis of care practices in contexts for people with intellectual disabilities’) again explores the concepts of autonomy and dependence, and the notion of care as not acting. You write that the findings from this study ‘reveal the coexistence of two distinct models: one that sees care as an instrumental task linked to maintaining order and preventing risk, and another that understands it as a way of ethical engagement.’ Could you elaborate on your main argument in this paper?

My main argument is that many institutional practices prioritise the elimination of risk over the promotion of autonomy, ultimately giving rise to forms of control that can dehumanise care. The pursuit of a static and predictable order through a ‘safety programme’ is, as the study warns, a devitalising illusion that undermines the very existence of people with an intellectual disability. When organisations and families impose a ‘configuration of care as a task’, focused solely on harm prevention, they fall squarely into the ‘paradox of safety’. Etymologically, security means ‘without care’. Thus, the obsessive attempt to eradicate uncertainty becomes a mechanistic exercise that abdicates true caring, which demands embracing a ‘shared-common vulnerability” as an intrinsic condition of being alive.

The radical danger of this logic is that it ultimately ‘sacrifices life itself on the altar of order and control’. By standardising interactions and prioritising the rigid timetables of the institution, roles are depersonalised and the uniqueness of the subject is denied. As in the analogy of The Invention of Morel [a novel by Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares, published in 1940], capturing life in an identical and absolutely predictable repetition to avoid disorder is tantamount to nullifying its developmental potential. Living systems require disorder to self-organise; therefore, a ‘zero-risk’ policy obstructs any possibility of learning, change, or personal flourishing.

Furthermore, this model unidirectionally centralises the definition of risk within the staff, excluding the perspective of the people directly affected. By preventing a service user, for instance, from going out alone for a coffee under the pretext of protecting her, what is often sought is ‘risk coverage’ so that professionals are not branded as ‘negligent’. This dynamic strips the individual of their right to experience ‘their own decisions’. Risk does not exist independently of a social construction.

Faced with these micropolitics of control, it is urgent to validate the ‘configuration of care as an ethic’, firmly linked to the ‘dignity of risk’. This implies understanding autonomy not as individualistic or self-sufficient self-reliance, but as an ‘interdependent autonomy’ that is fostered within a relational and community network. For this to be possible, staff must enable invisible practices of ‘receptivity’ and ‘conscious abstention’, which means suspending the predictive anticipation of absolute knowledge to ‘let the other be’ and ‘let the other do’. To truly care is not to eliminate the possibility of injury through domination, but rather to sustain a ‘wager’ based on ‘attentive trust’.

Moving on from these publications, can I ask about the work you’re engaged in now, and your plans for future research?

I believe it is vital to investigate in depth how disabled people act as agents of care: how they provide care, what or whom they care for, and what support and networks they rely on to do so.

This perspective is essential because caring is an inherently human dimension; everyone has the capacity to care, albeit in diverse ways. In cases where individuals with intellectual disabilities do not use verbal language to express this facet, future research should turn its attention to their support networks. It would be highly valuable for methodological studies to capture the testimonies of care professionals and families themselves, asking: how do they feel cared for by the individuals they assist? Shedding light on these invisible dynamics serves as a disruptive conceptual and political exercise that dismantles the traditional, unidirectional logic of dependency.

As we’ve discussed, your work provides a meeting point for the ethics of care and the study of intellectual disability. Where would you like to see work in this field going in the future, and what are the questions that still need to be explored?

I am currently exploring the tensions between safety and care in relation to disabled people, particularly those with intellectual disabilities. Professionals and families frequently face the dilemma of protecting an individual - at times from themselves, or despite themselves - at the risk of undermining their autonomy. I contend that it is essential to delve deeper into these dilemmas through concrete situations and from a situated perspective; failing to do so leaves us vulnerable to falling into either negligence or paternalism.

Whilst we champion a progressive approach to self-determination, when a person’s safety is at stake, security is commonly prioritised. In bioethical terms, this represents the primacy of the principles of beneficence and non-maleficence over autonomy. However, my interest lies in examining this complexity beyond mere dichotomies. This is fundamental to ensure that autonomy does not become a mere declaration of intent, and that the ‘dignity of risk’ is not used as an excuse to evade care responsibilities. Of particular interest to me is how these dynamics unfold within the specific context of organisations and services dedicated to care, as I believe this debate must be firmly placed on the agenda for future research in the field.

Finally, I just want to say a huge ‘thank you’, Martin, for inviting me to do this interview and for giving me such a wonderful space to share these reflections with you.

Note

[1] Diego explains that ‘the Centros Cuidar [care centres] belong to the Municipality of Rosario, in the central region of Argentina. They are strategically located in the city’s most vulnerable neighbourhoods to enable the inclusion of entire families, promoting the full exercise of their rights through various initiatives’.

…

The header image for this post is an image from the Centro Cuidar where Diego undertook his research, and whose motto is Un espacio para reencontrarse con la propia naturaleza (A space to reconnect with one’s own nature), which (Diego explains) ‘does not propose a regressive nostalgia or a return to the identical, but a journey of transformation embodied in the figure of the spiral.’ He adds: ‘Unlike the closed circle that condemns time to a sterile repetition, the spiral embraces cyclicality as an infinite movement where the past integrates with the present, allowing one to return to oneself but “from another place”. Furthermore, this relates to the recovery of ancestral knowledge from indigenous Andean peoples of Latin America. For example, it revives the care for the land that these peoples practised and continue to practise, as well as the communal mud constructions known as mingas. This aesthetic of the open, moving circle ultimately merges with an ethical dimension: a reverential curvature of Levinasian inspiration that bows to alterity, shaping a hospitable space where respect for the Other’s autonomy and dignity guides every process of change.’ Photo courtesy of Diego Carmona Gallego.

My guest for the thirtieth episode of the Careful Thinking podcast is Canadian political scientist Maggie FitzGerald. Maggie is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Saskatchewan. Her research focuses on the ethics of care, global ethics and international political theory, decolonial ethics, normative and critical international relations theory, and feminist political economy.

Maggie is the author of Care and the Pluriverse: Rethinking Global Ethics, which was published by Bristol University Press in 2022. She was the co-editor, with Sophie Bourgault and Fiona Robinson, of Decentering Epistemologies and Challenging Privilege: Critical Care Ethics Perspectives, which was published by Rutgers University Press in 2024.

                                                              Maggie FitzGerald

I’ve been aware of Maggie’s work for some time. We both attended the inaugural conference of the Care Ethics Research Consortium in Portland, Oregon, in 2018, and in fact Maggie co-wrote the conference report which was published in the International Journal of Care and Caring. But it was her contribution to that recent edited collection, Decentering Epistemologies, based on the second CERC conference in Ottawa in 2021, which really brought Maggie’s research to my attention and made me want to read more of her writing. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed engaging with her work in preparation for the podcast, and it was a pleasure to spend time talking with Maggie about her research, which addresses some key issues in contemporary care theory.

Maggie’s writing on care and the ‘pluriverse’, in which she develops a global ethic of care that takes account of radically different forms of life, represents a significant contribution to the drive to ‘decolonise’ care ethics, ‘decentring’ assumptions about care derived from the Global North and taking account of diverse perspectives from the majority world. In this regard, there were echoes in our conversation of previous episodes of the podcast, such as Episode 13, in which I interviewed Canadian-Pakistani political scientist Sarah Munawar about her work developing a Muslim feminist ethic of care, Episode 19, which featured educational theorist Mia Sosa-Provencio talking about a Mexicana/Mestiza critical feminist ethic of care, and Episode 25 in which researcher Alisha Ibkar drew attention to what can be learned from care practices in Indian Muslim communities. And in my interview with leading care theorist Maurice Hamington in Episode 6 of the podcast we discussed what he writes in his most recent book, Revolutionary Care: Commitment and Ethos, about the need for care theory to pay attention to non-Western thinkers, perspectives and practices.

I played devil’s advocate a little in my interview with Maggie, questioning whether her ‘pluriversal’ ethic risks simply reversing the colonialist binary, so that now Global North=bad, Global South=good. Maggie gave a thoughtful response to my challenge, which I’ll quote here, as she said it much better than I could possibly summarise:

I don't want to invert the binary. I want to do away with it altogether. What I try to articulate in the book is that moral judgment is contextually specific. It's not universal, and moral response does change depending on the context we find ourselves in. At the same time, though, this isn't a descent into relativism. Certain things are certainly wrong in certain contexts, and so it's not an ‘anything goes’ situation. It's simply saying that we must make moral judgments by looking at actual forms of life, actual ethical claims, and actual needs. We must also do this work tentatively, with humility, knowing that we could be wrong.

I also wondered whether the decolonial critique which Maggie advances in Care and the Pluriverse actually depends on intellectual frameworks (e.g. feminism, Marxism, etc.) which derive from the Western modernity that she is critiquing. Once again, I think Maggie’s response is worth quoting at length:

I don’t want to abandon modernity, even though I’m perhaps quite critical of it in the book. But I want us to think seriously about the harms that the modern world has committed and continues to commit. I think that really what I’m asking us to consider is that what we might owe others so very often is in fact a change to our own form of life. What would it look like to make the modern world a more caring, liveable world for others, but also for those in and of the modern world? And so I think this is about not sort of uncritically valorising other ways of knowing and being, but rather trying to learn from other forms of life.

There were some interesting connections between my conversation with Maggie and one or two of the issues that I’ve explored in recent Substack posts. Maggie’s work exploring the role of care in repair following violence or trauma connects with the discussion of care as a response to crime in my recent post on the subject. And Maggie’s as yet unpublished work on love and care, which we discussed towards the end of the episode, reminded me of my recent post on knowing, loving and caring, and indeed Maggie responded to that post in the course of our conversation.

Maggie is one of the most impressive younger scholars currently working in the field of care ethics, and I’m sure we’ll be hearing a lot more from her in the future. I’m certainly looking forward to reading the book that she’s planning on care ethics and repair, and I hope she’ll come back and talk about it on the podcast when it’s published.

We began our conversation in the episode by discussing Maggie’s early influences, including her background in political economy and her introduction to care ethics, which came principally through working with the leading Canadian care ethicist Fiona Robinson, though Maggie also highlighted the influence of other feminist care theorists such as Joan Tronto and Sophie Bourgault, as well as philosophers like Margaret Urban Walker. Moving on to her monograph, Maggie explained the concept of the ‘pluriverse’ and the book’s use of case studies from indigenous cultures in New Zealand and Canada to illustrate her argument that ethics needs to take account of ‘pluriversal differences’. She argued that the relational ontology and situated epistemology of care ethics can help in this process.

We went on to discuss what Maggie has written about the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and the way it highlighted vulnerability and interdependence and challenged political frameworks that seek to obscure these features of human experience. Returning to the topic of decolonising care ethics, we discussed the book she co-edited on Decentering Epistemologies, and in particular her own chapter in that volume on the need to work at decentring our inherited assumptions about care. From there we moved on to Maggie’s article on violence, colonialism and care, before finally talking about her current project on love and care.

                         L to R: Fiona Robinson, Sophie Bourgault, Margaret Urban Walker

Here are some further quotes by Maggie from our conversation:

In my book, I use this idea of the pluriverse to foreground radical difference, different forms of life that cannot be easily translated. And I ask, how can we make ethical determinations when there is deep and pervasive difference at play? Ethical life is especially tricky, I think, when we have different subjects, different norms, different values and beliefs, and social political formations to contend with. So in the book, I articulate how I see the ethics of care as a useful approach for navigating ethical conundrums when there are specifically ontological differences shaping the context or even central to the dilemma itself. In particular, I think that care ethics’ emphasis on context, attentiveness and humility makes it really useful for navigating these types of situations, for responding to harms and taking responsibility for wrongdoing, but in a way that foregrounds the vulnerability of judgment and the limits of knowing across difference.

...

How can we care for the Whanganui River when the Whanganui River is itself an ontological multiplicity? For settlers like myself, the river might be best understood as a part of what we call nature and perhaps at worst, as a resource to be exploited. But for the Whanganui Maori people, however, the river is a kin and living ancestor. And so we see what I’ve called pluriversal differences at play here. The very ontological status of the river is not settled, and yet you have different groups of people who are invested in caring for the river. I think anchoring my analysis of difference in these types of real world issues helps ground the concept of the pluriverse, which is a concept that I think can feel very abstract at first glance.

...

If we want to care for or build a world in which many worlds are possible, maintaining different forms of life and changing particular forms of life so that they are more liveable and can make space for others is a central political ethical task. Care ethics provides us with a lens or a thin normative organising trajectory, as Maurice Hamington puts it, to take on this relational work. I also think that the situated epistemology of care ethics further emphasises that because we are relational beings, we know what we know from where and who we are. This means that knowing how to care for different others or different worlds is difficult work. We cannot assume to know or always effectively imagine what others need or desire. So, again, I think this starting point is really useful in the context of the pluriverse. It orients us towards responding to others, to tending to different worlds, but also helps us accept the responsibility of this difficult work in the face of the limits to knowing and the vulnerability of ethical judgment.

...

I think the pandemic forced many people who are privileged and able to ignore the vulnerability of their existence to confront vulnerability in a way that they don’t usually do...And so we saw the pandemic as an event or a rupture, because it sort of caused us to confront certain truths about the human condition, truths about our vulnerable existence that are often ignored or repressed by what we called the liberal framework, which is a very dominant socio-symbolic framework, and which really hinges on the idea of independence. We also suggested that in this rupture of that socio-symbolic framework, the norms and institutions and structures that are ultimately unsustainable when directly confronted with the real human experience of vulnerability and interdependency were sort of opened up to critique.

You can listen to the whole episode here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can download a transcript of the episode here:

Careful Thinking Episode 30 Maggie Fitzgerald Transcript

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The header image for this post is the painting ‘Autumn Girl With Child’ by Pauline Kahurangi Yearbury (1928 - 1977), a leading practitioner of modernist Maori art.

‘I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.’

W. H. Auden, ‘September 1, 1939’

Visiting my wife’s parents’ grave recently, we noticed a group of men working in the churchyard, cutting the grass and sweeping paths. The logo on their high-vis jackets and on the van parked nearby indicated that they were part of a Community Payback scheme. In other words, these were offenders carrying out what used to be known as community service orders, a court-mandated alternative to prison. Watching them at work made me wonder whether this could be described as a ‘care-ful’ response to crime.

It also reminded me that I’ve been meaning to write something about crime, justice and care, ever since I read a post over at Mélina Magdelénat’s Substack, on ‘Care in uncaring places’, in which she interviewed Claire Favre, a clinical psychologist with experience of working in the French prison system. And the process of writing my recent post about ‘Education as a practice of care’, in which I described my earlier career organising educational programmes for ex-offenders, has brought back memories of those times and set me thinking about what a care ethical approach to crime might look like.

          Community Payback team working in a churchyard in Bolton, Lancashire 
                              (image via https://www.theboltonnews.co.uk)

As I mentioned in that earlier post, between finishing my first degree and starting my doctoral research, I spent a year working as a full-time volunteer in a hostel for ex-prisoners with mental health challenges. Then, as a postgraduate student in Manchester, I volunteered at an education project in the city run by NACRO, the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders. Those experiences helped me secure my first full-time job, managing a new NACRO education project in Basildon, Essex, which in turn led to my appointment as an education officer at NACRO’s North London Education Project, an initiative offering accommodation and support to ex-prisoners seeking to continue their studies on release.

One of my responsibilities in the latter role was visiting prisons to interview prospective applicants to the project. The interviews usually took place in the education wing, where applicants had been studying during their time inside. In her interview with Mélina, Claire Favre talks about the paradox of offering care, which in her case meant therapeutic treatment, in ‘uncaring’ places such as prisons. In my experience, education wings also represented spaces of care, oases of more humane and ‘care-ful’ relationships, within the generally ‘care-less’ environment of the prison.

The two prisons with which our project had the closest ties were Pentonville, a typical Victorian men’s prison, and Holloway, a women’s prison, at the other end of Caledonian Road, which has since closed. Holloway offered perhaps the starkest example of an attempt to create a haven of care in an uncaring environment, in the form of its controversial ‘mother and baby’ unit, which allowed women to keep their young children with them while serving their sentences. There was a vigorous debate at the time about whether this was really a ‘caring’ initiative, or whether there was something inherently uncaring about confining innocent children in prison. Recalling those debates now, I’m reminded of my interview for the Careful Thinking podcast with political scientist Lorraine Krall McCrary, in which she talked about her research on the work of midwives in Auschwitz, whose care for pregnant women she interprets, drawing on Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality, as ‘bearing witness to natality’ - to life, hope and care - in an institution whose raison d'être was the very opposite of care.

While some of the women in Holloway had been convicted of serious crimes, many were petty criminals and were themselves victims of violent or abusive relationships. At the north London project, we formed close links with the advocacy organisation Women in Prison, which was set up by former prisoners to support women caught up in the criminal justice system. One of the offshoots of their work was the women’s theatre company Clean Break which uses drama to shine a light on the uncaring conditions experienced by many women prisoners and to campaign for change. Shortly after joining The Open University in the early 1990s, I wrote and presented a radio programme, as part of the BBC/OU ArtWorks series, which focused on the work of Clean Break and included an interview with Anna Reynolds, a young woman who had been convicted but later acquitted of killing her mother, while suffering from extreme hormone imbalance, and who has since gone on to become a successful dramatist, screenwriter and novelist. (There’s an interesting chapter by Caoimhe McAvinchey on the work of Clean Break, which makes connections with Joan Tronto’s work in care ethics, in the volume on Performing Care co-edited by James Thompson, my guest in Episode 11 of the podcast).

A scene from the recent Clean Break production of ‘Scenes from Lost Mothers’ by Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti (via cleanbreak.org.uk)

While Clean Break works mainly with ex-prisoners, others attempt, often against heavy odds, to carry out creative, arts-based work inside prisons. I recently came across the Locked Up Living podcast, in which forensic psychologists Naomi Murphy and David Jones interview people doing innovative work in closed institutions. I was particularly intrigued by their conversation in a recent episode with Jean Trounstine, who has pioneered productions of Shakespeare with women prisoners in the United States, motivated by a belief that literature and drama can help to transform lives damaged by the criminal justice system. Arts-based initiatives in prisons can be seen as another manifestation of care in uncaring places.

Reflecting on the contradictions involved in offering care in contexts of what we might call ‘un-care’, or even ‘anti-care’, also brought to mind the work of my Open University colleague Rod Earle, who himself spent some time in prison as a young man. I’m thinking particularly of his research with teenage fathers in young offender institutions, in which he explored the paradox of requiring prisoners to attend parenting classes, learning how to care in an institution inherently hostile to care. Rod has been an active supporter of The Open University’s longstanding educational work in prisons and recently co-edited a volume celebrating 50 years of that vital provision. He has also been one of the pioneers of ‘convict criminology’, scholarship on criminal justice by those with first-hand experience of the system.

It’s well known that the experience of imprisonment damages as much as it rehabilitates, tending to perpetuate a vicious cycle of ‘carelessness’. It’s also a truism that many who end up in prison are as much sinned against as sinning, having often been victims of neglect or abuse themselves. To paraphrase Auden’s poem at the head of this post, we might say that those who have experienced a lack of care tend to become uncaring in their turn. A striking instance of this is captured in the doctoral research undertaken by Rod Earle’s student Jade Levell, which examined the experiences of young men who had witnessed domestic violence in their childhood and later became caught up in gang culture: an example, we might say, of an experience of ‘un-care’ engendering ‘care-less’ behaviour.

Ironically, it is those with experience of the so-called ‘care system’ who are statistically most likely to end up in prison. Justin Rogers, another of my Open University colleagues, co-wrote a chapter for our recent book on Men and Loss, examining the high incidence of suicide and deaths in prison among ‘care experienced’ men. Justin’s co-author Ian Thomas writes from personal experience of both the care system and imprisonment. When I worked at the NACRO project in Basildon, our ex-offender volunteers included David Akinsanya, who had been ‘in care’ as a child and later spent time in young offender institutions, then known as ‘borstals’. As David wrote in an article for the Guardian some years later:

To be honest, it was no surprise to go straight from care into custody. I’d grown up being told I’d make nothing of my life and borstal was, and still is, part of the expected journey – many of the boys I knew left care for jail, while the girls left with babies. I was 18 when I was locked up, and hadn’t had anyone looking after me officially for three years. I had just been given a flat and left to get on with it.

However, for David, it was a caring intervention by a social worker that helped to turn his life around:

Unlike many in care, I had someone who continued to watch out for me in an official capacity as my ‘social aunt’ – Jenni Randall, who had been my social worker from the age of eight until I was 14…She visited, wrote to me, and made me feel like someone cared…When I came out of borstal, she was there. She fed me, did my washing and encouraged me to follow the path I did.

David would go on to become a leading activist on behalf of young people in care, as well as a highly-regarded journalist and film maker. His experience offers an illustration of how an experience of authentic care can help to repair a life damaged by a lack of care.

             L to R: Rod Earle, Jade Levell, Justin Rogers, Ian Thomas, David Akinsanya

Some years ago, I led an Open University/Action for Children research study which involved interviewing young men in contact with social care services across the UK. At ‘Moving On’, a project for young offenders in an economically depressed area in the west of Scotland, participants spoke about growing up in an environment characterised by poverty, addiction, violence, and crime. Staff at the project, who were often from similar backgrounds, sought to break that cycle by providing a space of care for those they worked with. The young men we interviewed described feeling genuinely cared for, often for the first time in their lives. The project can be said to have created an alternative, virtuous circle of care. As one of the project workers said: ‘When we ask the guys what they want to do with their lives, they say, “I want to do what you do”’. In other words, an experience of being cared for engendered a desire to care for others. When I worked at the north London project, it was a standing joke that our ex-prisoner students all wanted to become social workers. To turn that quote from Auden on its head, we might say that those to whom good is done will be motivated to do good in return.

                    Project workers and service users at ‘Moving On’, Kilmarnock
 (image from the Open University film, ‘Beyond male role models: working with young men’)       

Some of the participants in that research study were young fathers, and they would often claim that becoming a dad had played a vital role in rescuing them from a life of crime. Teenage fathers tend to be portrayed in the media as feckless and irresponsible, but these young men, despite their often traumatic upbringing, were determined to do things differently and to be actively involved in the care of their children. In these cases, we could say that it was an experience of caregiving that interrupted the vicious circle of ‘carelessness’. On the same theme: some years ago, I supervised Jane Reeves’ doctoral research, in which she explored the lives of young fathers in contact with social services, examining the ways in which parenthood offered her participants a path from ‘recklessness’ to ‘responsibility’.

One of the strongest arguments for the kind of ‘community payback’ schemes with which I began this post, and for restorative justice more broadly, is that they require those who have committed crimes - have acted in ‘uncaring’ ways - to engage in acts of care, whether directly for the person they have offended or indirectly for the wider community, for example by caring for a graveyard, park or community building. In his classic work on Embodied Care, Maurice Hamington (my guest in Episode 6 of the Careful Thinking podcast) writes about the ways in which our bodies know ‘habitual activities of care’, arguing that ‘these are not instinctual activities but learned (and learning) behaviours that exhibit care’. The hope has to be that, for these offenders, participation in activities requiring care, whether for people or places, will inculcate habits of care that replace patterns of ‘care-less’ behaviour. Of course, some might question whether care that is compelled - in this case, by the justice system - can be described as ‘real’ care. At the same time, in cases of restorative justice, in which offenders are required to confront the victims of their crimes, the victim must always have the right of refusal: one cannot be compelled to ‘receive’ care.

None of this is to suggest that care should be the only or the whole response to crime. Readers who have been victims of crime, or who live in high crime neighbourhoods, may justifiably argue that the first priority of criminal justice policy should be to deter crime, and that deterrence needs to include the threat of meaningful punishment. Criminal behaviour, whether it’s theft or an act of violence, can be viewed as an offence against care, breaking the bonds of care and interdependence which are at the heart of any community, and the community has a right to ensure that such actions will have serious consequences. And of course there’s a powerful argument that it’s the victims of crime who should be the primary recipients of ‘care’ from the wider community.

However, unless we want to return to an earlier and less forgiving era, in which those who committed even minor crimes were simply written off by society - either executed, transported, or locked away out of sight and forgotten - it’s surely in all our interests to find ways of reintegrating offenders into society and enabling them to become responsible - and caring - members of the community. I would suggest that the kinds of ‘care-ful’ interventions - whether community service, education, or creative arts - that I’ve described in this post should be seen as acts of care not only for offenders, but for the whole community.

…

The header image for this post is ‘Prison Paintings 16’, one of a series created between 1972 and 1978 by the Turkish artist Gülsün Karamustafa (via tate.org.uk). According to the Tate website: ‘Following the military coup of 1971 Karamustafa, who was a member of the 1968 generation and a politically active student during her university years in Istanbul, was arrested and sentenced to six months in prison for aiding and abetting political activists. The Prison Paintings were painted from memory, after the artist had been released from an institution intended for female prisoners serving life sentences.’

Episode 29 of the Careful Thinking podcast features my conversation with the Slovak philosopher and care theorist Adriana Jesenková.

Adriana is an Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts at Pavel Jozef Šafárik University in Košice in eastern Slovakia, where her research has explored issues of care, power and justice in education and medical practice from the perspective of feminist care ethics. She is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters in both Slovak and English, applying a care ethical perspective to subjects such as the education system in Slovakia, sex education, and the challenges posed by a fragmented and polarised society.

                                                               Adriana Jesenková

I first came across Adriana’s work when we both contributed to the edited collection on Care Ethics, Religion, and Spiritual Traditions, which was published by Peeters in 2022. I was also interested to see that Adriana had contributed a chapter to the 2020 volume on Care Ethics, Democratic Citizenship and the State, which was co-edited by the Czech scholar Petr Urban, my guest in Episode 4 of the podcast. Since then, I’ve followed Adriana’s publications closely, and I’ve been particularly interested to see how she applies insights from care ethics to the particular circumstances of a post-communist society like Slovakia.

As I mentioned in my last post, interviewing Adriana set me thinking about the relationship between education and care, and reminded me of previous episodes of the podcast, such as Episode 19 with Mia Sosa-Provencio, which also explored the ways in which education can be viewed as a practice of care. Adriana’s work raises intriguing questions about the role of education in nurturing an ethic of care and promoting what Joan Tronto would describe as a ‘caring democracy’.

It was interesting to talk with Adriana about her extensive writing and activism around sex education, and about the boundaries between the public and private realms in relation to this topic, particularly in the light of my post earlier this year on the role of the state in care. Adriana’s criticisms of the role of the Church in this area made quite a contrast with the previous episode, which featured an author whose work is deeply rooted in his Catholic faith. I confess that I went into the interview prepared to be critical of Adriana’s stance on these issues, but I thought she gave beautifully nuanced answers to my questions, balancing a respect for the views of those who see sex and intimate relationships as in some sense sacred and therefore private, and the responsibility of the wider community to ensure the wellbeing of the vulnerable and prevent abuse.

I learnt a lot from talking with Adriana, not least about the culture and history of Slovakia, a country about which I confess I knew very little beforehand. Coincidentally, I’ve just finished reading Luka Ivan Jukic’s book Central Europe: The Death of a Civilisation and the Life of an Idea, which was published last year, and which I’d recommend to anyone wanting to get a sense of the complex history of that part of the world.

                     L to R: Etela Farkašová, Zuzana Kiczková, and Mariana Szapuová 

We began our conversation on the podcast by discussing Adriana’s upbringing and education against the background of the transition to democracy country following the Velvet Revolution in what was then Czechoslovakia. Adriana spoke about her university studies in philosophy and especially about the important influence of her supervisor and mentor, Etela Farkašová, as well as other Slovak feminist philosophers such as Zuzana Kiczková and Mariana Szapuová. We discussed Adriana’s introduction to feminist care ethics, which came primarily through discovering the work of Joan Tronto, who has clearly been a major influence on her work.

Moving on to Adriana’s own writing, we discussed the reasons for her focus on education and what she has described as a ‘deficit of care’ in the education system of her home country, and how feminist care ethics can contribute to understanding and addressing these issues. We then discussed Adriana’s work on sex education, before turning finally to a recent article in which she describes the experience of using a novel by Etela Farkašová in her philosophy teaching, as a way of addressing what she sees as the fragmentation of contemporary Slovak society and as a way of ‘caring’ for intergenerational relations. Towards the end of our conversation, Adriana talked about her plans to write a book which will interpret some of the key elements of care ethics for a Slovak audience.

Here are some quotes by Adriana from our conversation:

My supervisor for my thesis was Etela Farkašová, a prominent Slovak philosopher and writer, who is one of the three Slovak philosophers, women philosophers working at the Department of History of Philosophy at the Faculty of Arts of Comenius University in Bratislava. And she brought feminist philosophy to the Slovak and Czech environment in the ‘90s. And for me, and for my colleagues from this time, it was a very important and formative period in our lives. We are talking...about this time of a very exciting period in our life, because we had the opportunity the first time to know something new about Western philosophy, about feminist philosophy. And Etela Farkašová, my supervisor and mentor, together with Zuzana Kiczková and Mariana Szapuová…started university-wide interdisciplinary courses in gender theory and feminist philosophy and founded the Centre for Gender Studies, which operates at Comenius University to this day.

...

I am interested in mainly practically-oriented philosophy...relationships, mutual relations between women and men, justice, inequalities, love, power, suffering, the good life....and this practically-oriented philosophy was for me feminist philosophy, pragmatism and moral philosophy especially, but also social and political philosophy. But very early I understood that it is also about epistemology and ontological questions, how I think the world...functions and about its structure...what determines our understanding of our obligations, duties and needs and ideals and values. So during my studies, these practical questions about...personal life, family life, social life, professional life, it was very important for me to find out and to look for the concepts and theories that could answer...these important questions for me.

...

Around 2012...I started working as a university teacher, and I joined the first teachers’ strike in Slovakia. And the marginalisation of care in the teaching profession...became a completely obvious question and problem for me. And I also can say that I learned about Joan Tronto’s book Caring Democracy in that time...and everything suddenly began to take on different shapes, meaning and logic. And I understood that my feelings, my intuitions about this deficit of care and...injustices and inequalities...in different social areas of life and professions could be understandable through the conceptions of Joan Tronto and care ethics. Feminist care ethics...is a conceptual tool for me. It allows me to grasp clearly what I often perceive…only intuitively.

...

It is important to say that before the Velvet Revolution...Slovaks and Czechs lived in a common state together in Czechoslovakia, and Czechoslovakia was a totalitarian state with real socialist economics, politics and culture. And I was seventeen and in the third class of gymnasium when the Velvet or ‘gentle’ revolution, as we are saying in Slovakia, started. And after the totalitarian system...collapsed we started democratisation...and Slovaks and Czech started to live in independent states in 1993. And we had clearer periods and also darker periods in the three decades from the Velvet Revolution in our country...We started to democratise the educational system through different reforms...We are still working on the improvement of the educational system in Slovakia. But the most important challenge, about inclusive education and about desegregation of marginalised pupils...is still very important and still unrealised.

...

If Nell Noddings and Virginia Held argue that the main purpose of education should be to form, develop, cultivate and strengthen human capacity to care for human relations and through them, for ourselves and others, we can ask our schools, our institutions and our politicians if we are preparing our children to be able for such caring practices. And some of the last research studies said about the level of distrust...in Slovak society...so this high level of distrust is a very strong factor of fragmentation of Slovak society. And where society is so fragmented, it is not possible to join together and to collectively act. And also it is very complicated...in such a fragmented society to feel mutual and common responsibility for others...What is very inspirational from care ethics is its appeal to us that we need our institutions and also our individuals to educate for the ability to care more responsibly and non-hegemonically.

...

I am not only a university teacher and a teacher who is philosopher, I am also an activist, I’m also working in an NGO, and we are focusing on gender sensitive education and supporting human rights, culture and civic society and civic participation. And we started to focus on the problematic of gender sensitive education together with education for reproductive health and also healthy intimate relationship and sexuality...We were witnessing discrimination practices and inequalities as a consequence of marginalisation and segregation processes of social injustices. And we perceived the necessity to...have more information about the attitudes of young people about sexuality and sexual rights. And it was in the time when I started to read Joan Tronto and her Caring Democracy and Moral Boundaries and we drew inspiration from care ethics for designing our research project.

...

I agree...that when it is possible, the state should not interfere in the private sphere. But about 90% of sexual violence...is...in close and intimate relations. So how to ignore...this... terrible amount of violence, and argue that this is the private sphere and we the others, it is not only the state, but we, neighbours, friends, citizens, the members of the same society, the same community, that we should ignore this violence...? I think that care ethics is able to say us that caring is necessary. Why? Because all we are vulnerable, and...we all are able to hurt others. And we are responsible for using our power... we all have power and we also are able to use this power...maybe not intentionally, but we are able to hurt others, to act so they will be suffering and they will feel pain and they will be traumatised....If it is important for us, so it is necessary to not think in such rigid differentiations and classifications...We are interfering through legislation, through visible and invisible practices of power and misusing of power…And when we are ignoring these practices of mutual interference, we are ignoring the misusing of power and we are empowering vulnerabilities of the most vulnerable people.

...

Our society, together with Hungarian and Polish societies...are the most fragmented and polarised societies in Europe. And I really experienced it on my own skin...and it touched me, this experience...and the sharing of this experience was for me very important, very healing, very caring...It was very important for me. And it showed me that it is not only my experience, that it is something that needs to be reflected. And what is the way out from this, what to do? For me, it was something, what is very important, what to do. And that is why I am doing philosophy, because for me, it is the way how to solve not only my problems, but problems of my community, my society, my environment...And now these problems of fragmented relations are important, because when we are fragmented, we are vulnerable. We are vulnerable not only as individuals, but also as a collective, as a community...And it is important to look for ways how to empower caring relations, because through caring relations we can renew our energy.

You can listen to the whole episode here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can download a transcript of the episode here:

Careful Thinking Adriana Jesenkova Transcript

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The header image for this post is the painting ‘Behind The People’ by contemporary Slovak artist Jana Bakičová who often exhibits her work in Košice (permission requested).

‘Once...I became an early childhood teacher, the...message I heard was, “Don’t talk about care”. At conferences and leadership institutes I was told, “You will never be understood or respected if you use care to describe your work...you should use the language of education.”’

Carol Garboden Murray, Illuminating Care: The Pedagogy and Practice of Care in Early Childhood Communities (2021).

‘If Nell Noddings and Virginia Held argue that the main purpose of education should be to form, develop, cultivate and strengthen human capacity to care for human relations, and through them for ourselves and others, we can ask our schools, our institutions and our politicians if we are preparing our children for such caring practices.’

Adriana Jesenková, Careful Thinking podcast (forthcoming episode)

‘Education…is not solely concerned with the intellect; it is not limited to instructing the individual and enabling them to experiment, to develop their linguistic abilities, rhetoric, and logical reasoning; it addresses the person as a whole, their sensitivity, their emotions, and their moral sense.’

Corine Pelluchon, Éthique de la consideration (2018; my translation)

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the relationship between education and care. In part this has been prompted by my recent interview, for the Careful Thinking podcast, with the Slovak philosopher and care theorist Adriana Jesenková (that episode will be available soon). Much of Adriana’s work has involved applying a feminist care ethical perspective to the education system of her home country.

Also, last year I interviewed Mia Sosa-Provencio, whose research explores the ways in which teachers working in schools along the U.S./Mexico border are developing a critical feminist ethic of care in their practice as educators. Talking with Mia brought back memories of my own experience of working in adult and community education, before I became a university teacher. As I wrote in a post at the time:

I...found Mia’s application of a care-ethical framework to her educational practice, and her description of the ways in which educational spaces often exclude care, intriguing. It made me realise that I tend to keep my own experience as an educator, and my research interests in care, separate in my mind. Listening to Mia made me re-think those connections and imagine ways of reconceiving my educational practice as a practice of care.

Not long after that, my podcast conversation with Dutch researchers Andries Baart and Guus Timmerman, about their book on Relational Caring and Presence Theory, made me realise that the way they talked about ‘practising presence’ in care work, working in a relational way but with ‘no fixed goals...no fixed method’, could have described my own practice as a community educator, all those years ago. As I wrote at the time: ‘I’m not sure I was exactly “practising presence”, as described by Andries and Guus, though much of my work involved forming relationships with groups of local people and doing my best to respond to their needs, whatever they were.’

All of this has made me reflect again on the ways in which my work as an educator, and particularly my earlier work in adult and community education, might have been a practice of care, in ways that I haven’t fully understood until now. It has also made me speculate about my reasons for wanting to keep my educational practice, and my interest in care, in separate mental boxes.

Although I’ve never been a paid worker in the care field, it was actually a brief stint in a voluntary care role that would lead, in a roundabout way, to my subsequent career in education. Between finishing my bachelor’s degree and starting postgraduate study, I spent a year as a full-time volunteer in a hostel for what were described as ‘mentally disturbed’ ex-prisoners, many of them former residents of secure hospitals like Broadmoor and Rampton. I learnt a lot in the process, not least about myself and my own limitations, but I was relieved to escape back to academic study at the end of the year.

Then, during my time as a doctoral student in Manchester, and looking to do some voluntary work in my spare time, I found my way to an education project in the city run by NACRO, the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders, where I signed on as a literacy tutor. (Interestingly, when I interviewed James Thompson, now a professor at the university, for the podcast, he revealed that he’d also been a volunteer at the same project, though some years after me.)

Back home in Essex, and needing to support myself while I finished my thesis, I initially took on part-time work teaching in further education colleges and for the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA). Eventually, I found a full-time job, setting up and managing a new NACRO education project in Basildon, an economically disadvantaged post-war new town. From there I moved on to another NACRO project in a multiethnic area of north London, this time a residential scheme supporting former prisoners to take up educational opportunities on their release. I was responsible for setting up and managing ‘The Basement’, a new education day centre, which was also open to the local community, with classes in everything from literacy and politics to cookery and computing. My next move was to a stigmatised housing estate on the outskirts of Oxford, where I was employed as the community education organiser for the area, responsible for responding to the educational needs of local residents, as well as providing alternative opportunities for truanting teenagers (and where I found myself working alongside Larry Sanders, brother of the more famous Bernie). My final post in community education was as director of ‘Baselines,’ a city-wide project providing adult basic education to the residents of Milton Keynes.

                  Classes at The Basement, North London Education Project, c. 1985
                     (that's me teaching a literacy class in the top right-hand photo)

I joined The Open University, which also has its base in Milton Keynes, in 1991, initially as a lecturer in community education, building on these years of community-based experience to develop learning materials for use by community groups, and also helping to set up the university’s first ‘access’ or pre-degree courses. However, just a few years after I joined the OU, the university decided to close its community education programme and our team found itself absorbed into our sister department of health and social care.

My colleague and mentor Andy Northedge and I were drafted in to use our experience at ‘access’ level to help create the University’s first entry-level course for care practitioners. We were there because of our pedagogic expertise, rather than for any knowledge of the care field, which was supplied by our more experienced health and social care colleagues. I recall walking back from one of our course team meetings with Andy, when he told me that he was beginning to find the subject of care surprisingly interesting. I was less enthusiastic. Looking back, I think it was because, at the time, I viewed care as a somewhat ‘fluffy’ and ill-defined subject, compared to education, which in my mind was about radical social change and grounded in rigorous pedagogic theory. I’m happy to acknowledge now that this may have been a defensive strategy on my part, and that my identity as a theoretically-informed radical educator was a kind of armour that protected me against getting too involved in the messy, emotional business of care.

What’s more, and despite my avowed pro-feminist beliefs, I suspect there was also an unconscious gendered element to all of this. Thinking back to the quotation from Carol Garboden Murray with which I began this post: one of the reasons often given for the difficulty of recruiting men to work with children in the early years is that care is still viewed as ‘women’s work’ and therefore held in low esteem (and, as a result, often poorly paid). One of the implicit aims, at least here in the UK, of the recent shift to talking about ‘early childhood education and care’ (ECEC) has been to attract more men to the field, since ‘education’ is still coded as masculine/high status and ‘care’ as feminine/low status.

So how did I go from this resistance to care, to spending the next two decades teaching, researching and writing about the subject? Partly, it was the practical need to accommodate myself to my new academic position in a department of health and social care. But much more significantly, it was the personal experience around this time of becoming a father. Attempting to put my pro-feminism into practice by being a ‘hands on’ dad and taking an equal share in caring for our two young children certainly changed me as a person, helping me to develop my personal capacity for care. But it also led to a research interest in gender and care, which began with studies of engaged fatherhood and men working in childcare and expanded into a broader exploration of men’s practices and experiences of care, leading eventually to an interest in care ethics and care theory.

So, have I got over my mental separation of ‘education’ and ‘care’, and am I now more open to viewing education as a practice of care? Well, it depends what that means. If it signifies that we should educate with care, that as educators we should adopt a caring approach towards those we teach, that educators should treat each other care-fully, and indeed that educational institutions should care for those they employ, then of course I agree. These are some of the issues that Adriana Jesenková addresses in her book chapter on the ‘deficit of democratic care’ in the Slovak education system. On the other hand, if it’s argued that the business of education is to prepare people for care, or indeed that education should be all about care, then I do have some reservations.

I don’t think these reservations are just a personal, defensive response on my part. I believe there are also serious intellectual reasons for resisting a conflation of education with care. I acknowledge that those reasons have been partly informed by my personal experience, as someone from a modest social background who benefited from a fairly traditional education – grammar school, followed by becoming the first member of my family to go to university – which I found personally empowering and transformative. My beliefs about education were also formed by writers like the socialist critic and historian Raymond Williams (whose lectures I was fortunate to attend as an undergraduate), who believed that the accumulated knowledge and culture of the past was a common inheritance that should be open to all, and who fought against the postmodern tendency to denigrate traditional knowledge. Later, I would be influenced by the writings of the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, who argued that the task of radical educators was to introduce students to the breadth of human culture and to empower them to become critical contributors to it (see Harold Entwistle’s 1979 book, Antonio Gramsci: Conservative Schooling for Radical Politics). Gramsci was opposed to what he saw as a creeping tendency in his time (interestingly, supported by Mussolini) for education to focus on personal development rather than the transmission of knowledge, a tendency that he saw as fundamentally reactionary and disempowering.

In my time as a community educator, I was initially sympathetic to the ideas of Ivan Illich on ‘deschooling’ society, and Paolo Freire’s radical pedagogy, but eventually I became concerned about what I saw as a ‘therapeutic turn’ in adult education, in which the acquisition of knowledge was downplayed and the role of the teacher reduced to a mere facilitator of learning. When I joined The Open University, I was fortunate to find a kindred spirit in Andy Northedge, who was in the process of developing a ‘discourse’ model of adult education, which involved building on students’ ‘everyday’ discourse or understanding of the world, but using this to gradually introduce them to more powerful (and empowering) academic discourses. We attempted to implement this pedagogic model in our access courses, and Andy’s partner Ellie Chambers and I tried to encapsulate it in a book chapter at the time.

                     L to R: Raymond Williams, Antonio Gramsci, Ivan Illich, Paulo Freire

When I hear people suggesting that education should be all about care, it brings back memories of the debates we engaged in back then. My political views may have changed over the years, but I still worry that describing education as care risks reducing it to something more like therapy (not that there’s anything wrong with therapy). And yet, as a researcher and writer on care, I obviously believe passionately that an ethic of care should inform all social practices, including education [1].

So, how to square this circle? Towards the end of my recent conversation with Adriana for the podcast, we discussed an article in which she describes her experience of using a work of fiction by the philosopher and novelist Etela Farkašová as a teaching tool for addressing the question of intergenerational relations and social fragmentation in Slovak society. Adriana argued that philosophy can be a form of care, and she described her sense of gratitude to Farkašová for the way she ‘cares...for our community, our society’ through her writing and teaching. This made me think of an argument made by the contemporary French philosopher Corine Pelluchon (also quoted at the top of this post) in her 2018 book Éthique de la consideration (my translation):

Literary works remind us that ethics cannot be reduced to moral judgments or reasoning that persuades us whether a course of action is good or bad…Reading these texts…can facilitate the development of dialogical skills without which public deliberation and democracy—which require active, reflective, empathetic individuals inclined to participate in collective effort and promote a community of equals—are impossible. By illustrating the non-interchangeable nature of people and relationships…literature participates in the process of subjectivation which is essential to the practice of consideration and to the preservation of a healthy democracy [2].

The suggestion here is that reading – and studying and teaching – literature, and by implication the humanities in general, can contribute to developing a capacity to care, and thereby the development of what Joan Tronto would call a ‘caring democracy’, by enabling us to imaginatively inhabit the experiences and perspectives of others. This echoes Maurice Hamington’s argument, in his 2004 book on Embodied Care, that ‘imagination plays a crucial role in animating morality’ and that ‘one function of imagination is creating the possibility for empathy’. And in their 2019 book on Care Ethics and Poetry Maurice and his co-author Ce Rosenow describe how reading and studying poetry can help to activate the imagination, arguing that ‘imagination plays a crucial role in understanding the one cared-for and the context they are in’.

Perhaps this can help to resolve my concern that an emphasis on ‘care’ risks dumbing down education. Rather than reducing education to a knowledge-lite training in ‘how to care’, a liberal, humanistic education can nurture an ethic of care by opening the mind, the imagination and the emotions to seeing the other and the world in more ‘care-ful’ ways.

These are complex issues and there’s a lot more that could be said about the subject, so perhaps I’ll return to it at a future date. In the meantime, I’d be interested to hear what others think. For now, I’ll end, as I began, with a quotation from Carol Garboden Murray’s Illuminating Care:

Education grows us. It has the potential to expand mind, heart, and body. We value education because it requires thinking. Education helps us individualise and allows us to be independent. Education liberates us, strengthens us, and offers a new opportunity. Care does all these things. Care is not subordinate to education, care is education. When we unite care and education, we care in a way that nurtures another’s independence, actualisation, and self-sufficiency.

I’d probably want to tweak that a little. From the perspective of care ethics, I’d suggest that education helps us to be interdependent as much as independent, and that rather than self-sufficiency, it nurtures a capacity for relationship. But, with those caveats, Carol’s words are a neat summary of the truth that, in the final analysis, care is, or should be, a process of education – and education is, or should be, a practice of care.

Notes

1. I’m aware that my argument here applies mainly to adult and higher education. I’m more open to viewing the education of young children as being fundamentally about care. Readers who are interested in exploring further the connections between education and care in work with children in the early years should certainly read Carol Garboden Murray’s book. I’d also warmly recommend this new post by Bethany Hansel, over at Mélina Magdelénat’s Fifth Wave Institute.

2. Pelluchon’s use, here and throughout her book, of the word consideration, which doesn’t quite have the same meaning as its English equivalent, in preference to soin – care – would take a whole other post to explain.

…

The header image for this post is the painting ‘All About Education’ by Paris-born Canadian artist Sylvain Martin, who explains that this abstract work ‘explores the fundamental importance of education in a world plagued by fake news and the threat of manipulation of citizens.’ I’m grateful to Sylvain for permission to use the image.

My guest in Episode 28 of the Careful Thinking podcast is Zechariah Mickel, the author of The Unthinkable Sacrifice: An Essay on Fatherhood, which was published last year. The book explores its author’s personal experience of early fatherhood, using the tools of phenomenological philosophy.

Zech is an independent scholar working at the intersection of continental philosophy and theology. He holds an MA in Philosophy from the Global Center for Advanced Studies and has worked in schools as a therapeutic skills trainer and also as a marketing manager and associate editor at Wipf and Stock Publishers, where he continues to host The Theology Mill Podcast. Based in Oregon in the United States, Zech is a husband and a father to two young daughters (with a third on the way) and he’s also employed as an apprentice plumber.

                                                                 Zechariah Mickel

I first came across Zech’s work when I read a review of The Unthinkable Sacrifice in the online journal Fairer Disputations. As a researcher with an interest in fatherhood myself (see these posts), as well as someone with an interest in phenomenology (see this post), I was intrigued. I reviewed The Unthinkable Sacrifice briefly here, but I was curious to know more about the background to the book and the thinking behind it. So I was delighted when Zech accepted my invitation to be a guest on the podcast.

We’ve explored fatherhood on the podcast before, notably in my conversation with Aaron Jackson about his research with fathers of children with disabilities, in Episode 12. However, as I noted in my review of Zech’s book, despite the exponential growth of sociological research on fatherhood, to date there has been very little work on fatherhood in care theory, or in philosophy more generally, so The Unthinkable Sacrifice is an original and welcome addition to the literature.

As I also noted in that review, Zech’s exploration of the theme of sacrifice in the context of care reminded me of Inge van Nistelrooij’s 2015 book Sacrifice:A Care-Ethical Reappraisal of Sacrifice and Self-Sacrifice, which I discussed with her in Episode 17 of the podcast. Interestingly, both Inge and Zech draw on the work of the French philosopher and theologian Jean-Luc Marion in their writing. Another major philosopher whose work informs Zech’s book is Emmanuel Levinas, who has also been an important influence for other podcast guests including Nigel Rapport, whom I interviewed in Episode 3 (and who has since published a book on Levinas), as well as the late Ruth Groenhout (Episode 5) and Susi Ferrarello (Episode 14), among others.

In addition, Zech brings to his work insights from a group of philosophers who are associated with the so-called ‘theological turn’ in French phenomenology, and whose ideas have not, until now, been much discussed in relation to care. They including Emmanuel Falque (whom Zech has interviewed on his own podcast), Claude Romano, Michel Henry, Jean-Yves Lacoste and Jean-Louis Chrétien. As I mentioned in the episode, I’d warmly recommend Phenomenology in France: A Philosophical and Theological Introduction, by Steven DeLay, the author of the foreword to Zech’s book, to anyone looking for a comprehensive and accessible introduction to this interesting group of thinkers.

In common with a number of other recent conversations on the Careful Thinking podcast, this episode highlights the contribution that a theological perspective can make to thinking about care. Regular podcast listeners and readers of this Substack who are not themselves religious believers may be tempted to avoid this episode, and maybe Zech’s book, for this reason. However, when I asked Zech whether one needed to share his religious perspective in order to appreciate the book, he argued that the ‘content of the book is something that any parent could relate to’, adding: ‘I think we are all religious in the sense that we love things profoundly, that we regard some things or some persons as especially precious to us, and that our love for those things or those persons exceeds what we can grasp or understand or pin down.’

                   Top L to R: Jean-Luc Marion, Emmanuel Falque, Claude Romano

                Bottom L to R: Michel Henry, Jean-Yves Lacoste, Jean-Louis Chrétien

My conversation with Zech in the episode began by exploring his personal journey, including his family’s roots in the evangelical Foursquare church, his conversion to Catholicism, and the importance of faith in his life and work. We also discussed Zech’s experience of becoming a father and the impact it has had on his life and his thinking. Zech then talked about his work for Wipf and Stock Publishers, including his role as host of The Theology Mill Podcast, and his recent decision to return to his earlier apprenticeship as a plumber, alongside his philosophical research and writing.

Zech was introduced to phenomenology via his Masters course, and particularly by having Steven DeLay as a teacher, and we talked about the philosophers who influenced the thinking behind the book. That led us into a discussion of the book itself, which we explored in some detail, including its exploration of the father’s experience of his child’s soul and of the child’s vulnerability, and the ways in which phenomenology can offer useful insights into these experiences.

We then turned to the book’s critique of modernity and the negative impact that the contemporary emphasis on speed and consumption can have on the experience of fatherhood, and then to the final section of the book, in which Zech uses a variety of narrative examples, and notably the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, to explore the ways in which the burden of responsibility carried by fathers might be viewed as a form of sacrifice. Before leaving the book, I gave Zech the opportunity to respond to some of the criticisms of it that have been made by reviewers, and we ended by talking about his plans for future research and writing.

                                                  Photo via zechariahmickel.com

Here are some quotes by Zech from our conversation:

I really have loved being a father…I would say it’s a vocation that I really thoroughly enjoy and that feels really meaningful to me, even though it is a difficult vocation at the same time. So even as a child, I always expected that I would be a father one day. Family was always really important to me. I always thought that I would enjoy and love being a father. And that’s kind of exactly how things have turned out. Even still, though, with all that sort of anticipation and expectation I had of being a father, I don’t think I could have anticipated the depth of love that I would experience or the depths of responsibilities that are required in caring for children, so in caring for our two daughters and about to be three daughters.

...

The book started as an idea for my master’s thesis, and so I was thinking through what I could write about for that thesis…while I was in the midst of being a young dad, so being in the midst of one of the most, if not the most kind of powerful experiences in my life. And so I really felt tugged toward thinking through that experience in a really thorough way and using the tools of philosophy. So basically, my readings that I was already doing in phenomenology at that time were always illuminating aspects of that experience of being a young father. And so I was really feeling this need to try to kind of cobble together my experience as a father, and all these readings that I felt were shedding light on my experience as a father, and then trying to make meaning of all that reading and all that fathering and how those two might speak to each other…As I was researching and writing, it quickly became apparent to me…that it was going to be plenty enough material just to think through a simpler thing, which was how a father might carry his child’s soul, his child’s unique person and all its sort of plenitude and excess...and what it might mean to carry that plenitude in a way that is prayerful and that is accepting of the fears that can visit a father, as he conducts this work of love for his child.

...

I think that in part, what I like about those [phenomenological] thinkers is that, and I don’t want to say this in a way that makes it sound like I’m diminishing their work…I actually mean it as a compliment, but I think they’re by and large less rigorous in their writing and in their approach to thinking. So it’s a little less academic, ivory tower sort of style. But also, I think, because their writing feels to me a kind of mystical philosophy at times, a type of philosophy that’s more directly engaged with life and not just with books and with the ideas of other thinkers. So it’s a little less textual and a little more experiential, I would say. And I think my own thinking is maybe a little more existentialist in that way, and that I’m more interested in attending to concrete life and to spiritual life than I am in poring over tomes and tomes of the history of philosophy and doing that kind of technical and textual analysis of primary sources.

...

[Emmanuel] Levinas...tends to speak of the other’s face as this sort of gesture towards excess...And then [Jean-Luc] Marion takes that up and deliberately carries forward Levinas’ treatment of the face by speaking of the other’s face as what he calls an icon. So like a sacrament or an icon, the other’s face brings some excessive force with it, some invisible kind of power and magnitude that reach us paradoxically, through the visible manifestation of our gaze upon them...So it occurred to me while I was reading Marion that my experience beholding my daughter’s face...was precisely the same thing or was something similar to what he was describing, that there was some existential heft about her person that really bowled me over as a father, especially when I looked in her eyes, when I beheld her face. So in the book, I call this invisible force the child’s soul…So we could think of it as the child’s face almost as speaking the child’s soul, or as offering a concrete, incarnate manifestation to something which we find, I think, terribly hard to name or pin down, but experience as something almost more powerful than we can bear or than we know what to do with. So really, what I’m getting at with the soul is the preciousness of another person as we experience that in a posture of love towards them.

...

As a new father, I would say I was not at all prepared for the amount of tears that can come from a small child, the sheer volume, the amount of emotional tumult that they can experience in those early years. So it was this reckoning with what I was experiencing in my young daughter’s sufferings, but it was also this kind of perspective, this forward-looking fear of the sufferings or traumas that she might endure as she got older, and realising that I would have to gradually release her into a world that can often feel quite dark and quite frightening…I did not know that this was going to be a part of my experience of fatherhood beforehand. So in some ways this book was my way of working through those sorts of fears that can visit young parents, whether it’s a mother or a father, during those years, when you’re just now for the first time really reckoning with this massive protective task that you’ve been given, when you’ve been gifted with a very vulnerable young child, because all young children are very vulnerable.

...

For me [the story of Abraham and Isaac], even though it’s obviously a disturbing one…presents a question of possessiveness. So is Abraham prepared to let go of his son, if that’s what he has to do? Is he prepared to deface himself in a way where he has no hope of any kind of recovery of a normal and flourishing life afterwards? How can you ever recover and not be endlessly and agonisingly tormented after such an act? And so I’m very grateful that none of us as parents are called upon to make such an awful sacrifice. But I think the story really gets at this question of what it means to face the fears we have about our children, the kinds of irreversible damage that we’re so afraid of discovering in our kids as they journey through time, as they inevitably endure sufferings of their own. So what does it mean to accept that we don’t possess our children, that we don’t have and maybe shouldn’t have control over them…that we have to slowly release them into the world, that we can’t protect them from everything.

You can listen to the whole episode here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can download a transcript of the episode here:

Careful Thinking With Zechariah Mickel Transcript

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The header image for this post is the painting ‘Abraham and Isaac’ (2001) by Israel Tsvaygenbaum (permission requested). On his website, the artist describes the picture thus: ‘As a father of three children, I have always had a hard time understanding how readily Abraham obeyed God’s command to sacrifice his son Isaac. The story always gave me goosebumps. I am grateful that God only tested Abraham and ultimately spared Isaac’s life. The painting Abraham and Isaac is about the love between a father and a son.’

‘There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbour, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritise the rest of the world.’ – U.S. Vice-President J. D. Vance

‘The person is the kind of good towards which the only proper and adequate attitude is love’ – Karol Wojtyla (Pope St. John Paul II)

‘You don’t need to love someone to care for them’ - Nel Noddings

‘To know, know, know him
Is to love, love, love him’

- The Teddy Bears

How are knowing, loving, and caring connected? Do you need to know a person in order to care about them, and is it the case that the better you know someone, the more you love them, and therefore the more you care about their welfare? And does caring about someone necessarily lead to caring for them? This post is a series of loosely connected (and disconnected) thoughts around these questions.

In my recent review of the edited collection, Care Ethics and Beyond: Moral, Epistemological, and Cross-Cultural Perspectives, I noted that I was particularly intrigued by the second section of the book, in which different theorists explore what an ‘epistemology of care’ might look like: in other words, the ways in which caring can be a form of knowing. The section begins with a chapter by Vrinda Dalmiya, the author of the 2016 text Caring to Know: Comparative Care Ethics, Feminist Epistemology, and the Mahābhārata, which argued that, while caring and knowing are usually thought of as independent of each other, in fact ‘our lived experiences of caring and being cared for can be useful resources for truth-seeking.’

As I noted in my review, the discussion in this section of Care Ethics and Beyond can strike the non-philosophical reader as quite abstruse, though as I also mentioned, the chapter by Maurice Hamington (my guest in Episode 6 of the Careful Thinking podcast) is somewhat more accessible, being rooted in examples of everyday care. Building on his previous work in 2004’s ground-breaking Embodied Care, Maurice maintains that ‘the embodied practices of care generate knowledge and truth’ and that ‘care and knowledge are inextricably linked’.

I find these arguments about care as a form of knowledge fascinating and deeply sympathetic. However, reading these authors, I also find myself asking a rather different question, one which reverses the terms and poses the question: in what sense does knowing lead to caring?

I’ve often been struck by the phenomenon that simply knowing a person, even on a casual basis, for example as a neighbour, colleague, or fellow student, can lead to a kind of ‘love’, in the broadest sense of the word. The more familiar we are with someone, the more they became part of our emotional worlds and the more we experience a certain warmth towards them and an interest in their welfare, so that knowing results in caring - or at least, in caring about. I’ve written before about the squeamishness one might feel in using the word ‘love’ in this context, though the anthropologist Nigel Rapport, whom I interviewed for Episode 3 of the podcast, has no such hesitation. In our conversation, Nigel referred to the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch’s description of love as ‘a kind of epiphanous moment in which we surprise ourselves by realising the reality of the individual other, the particularity of being that something other than ourselves is real’, and he advocates the development of what he calls ‘cosmopolitan love’ at a community level.

So does knowing a person inevitably lead to loving them in this sense, and to caring about them? Is it always the case, in the words of that Teddy Bears song from 1959, that to ‘know, know, know’ someone is to ‘love, love, love’ them? Maybe I’ve been unusually fortunate in having come across very few people in my life whom I actively dislike, or who have taken a dislike to me, but in my experience, and with few exceptions, the better I’ve got to know a person, the more I’ve found myself caring about them.

And it does seem to be the case that the extent of our knowledge of a person largely determines the degree to which we care about them. We’ve all had the experience of watching or reading a news report of (say) a serious road accident, in which a number of unnamed people might have been injured. If we have any human feeling, we’ll experience a spontaneous sympathy for those affected. However, because the people involved are unknown to us, those feelings will probably only last a short time, and disappear as we move on with our lives. On the other hand, if we happen to recognise a name, or a face in a photo, among the victims, even if it’s only that of a casual acquaintance, perhaps someone we recognise from our daily commute or from standing alongside them at the school gates, then our feelings of sympathy will be both more intense and longer lasting.

So, to a degree, caring about a person does seem to depend on the extent to which we know them. Now, caring about is the first phase in the eminent care theorist Joan Tronto’s often-quoted five phases of care. As Tronto writes in 1993’s Moral Boundaries :

The first phase is caring about: noticing unmet care needs. The second phase is caring for: taking up the responsibility to meet care needs. The third phase is care-giving: delivering care. The fourth phase is care-receiving: evaluating the effectiveness of care after care has been received, either by the receiver or the provider(s) of care. The fifth phase is caring with: evaluating whether care needs are met in a way that is consistent with democratic commitments to justice, equality and freedom.

I have to confess that I’ve always been a little sceptical as to whether caring about is the best way of describing the initial phase of care. In fact, when Tronto glosses the term, she uses words such as recognition, or acknowledgement of needs, which are less misleading. Part of the problem is that the phrase caring about has a variety of different meanings, which often have little connection with caregiving. For example, lovers will often tell each other ‘I really care about you’, which doesn’t necessarily mean they are prepared to care for them - to become their caregiver - should the need arise.

In fact, I wonder if the tendency to link the very different meanings of the word ‘care’, in the phrases ‘caring about’ and ‘caring for’, may be a linguistic accident that only occurs in English. I’ve written before about the difficulties of translating the English word ‘care’ into other languages, which is mainly due to the fact that it can mean so many different things. Think, for example, of the different meanings of ‘care’ in the phrases ‘he cares for his elderly parents’, ‘she doesn’t have a care in the world’, or ‘take care when crossing the road’.

      From L to R: Vrinda Dalmiya, Maurice Hamington, Nigel Rapport, Joan Tronto

I was interested to read, in the piece by Myna Trustram in Care Aesthetics and the Arts, the other new book that I reviewed recently, about the surprising etymological derivation of the English word ‘care’. One might expect it to have some connection with the word cura in Latin and in a number of Romance languages, but in fact, as Trustram explains: ‘ “care” comes from the Old English caru – sorrow, anxiety, grief, and from the Old German char – lament, or a burden of the mind.’ And according to etymological dictionaries, the word only gradually came to mean being concerned about, or burdened with care for, another person. You can see how this eventually led to our modern English sense of ‘caring about’. The connection with ‘care’ as denoting ‘caregiving’ seems almost accidental.

In fact, other European languages tend to make a clearer distinction between caring about, or having a concern for another person, and caring for, or caregiving. In French, if you care about a person, you might say je me soucie de vous, or je tiens beaucoup de toi, whereas to express the sense of care as caregiving, you would use soigner or prendre soin. Similarly, in Italian, the closest equivalent to caring about someone would be preoccupare di qualcunco, or tenere di qualcuno, whereas to actually provide care is prendersi cura di qualcuno, and Spanish makes a similar distinction between preocuparse and cuidar. The difference also extends to non-Romance languages, including Dutch, where one might use om iemand geven to say you care about someone, but om iemand zorgen to represent the activity of caring for them. Unsurprisingly, given the roots of Old English, German is closer to English, in that the verb kümmern, which also has the sense of sorrow or anxiety, can be used for both caring about and caring for, though the latter is also expressed by the verbs sorgen, versorgen or pflegen.

Here I should add the caveat that I’m not a linguist, and I’d be happy to be corrected by readers who are native speakers, if I’ve got any of the above wrong. However, the point I’m trying to make is that the connection in English between caring about someone and caring for them may be the result of a linguistic coincidence, rather than a reflection of any necessary relationship between the two activities.

What’s more, we might question whether one actually has to care about a person in order to effectively care for them. In the words of the pioneering care theorist Nel Noddings, quoted above, we don’t always have to love someone in order to care well for them. If we think of the care provided every day by professional caregivers, then clearly it’s not always possible to know, and therefore care about, at an individual level, those they are charged with caring for. A nurse in a hospital may attend to the needs of dozens of different people, often for quite brief interactions, in a single day, and his or her knowledge of them, and therefore care about them as individuals, will necessarily be quite limited. Instead, he or she will (we hope) be motivated by a less individualised ‘caring about’ people in general.

On the other hand, if a caring interaction continues for a longer period, or if there are repeated interactions and the nurse gets to know the patient better, then he or she may come to care about them on a more personal level. Interestingly, this brings us back to where we started, with ‘caring to know’. It’s surely the case that caring for a person for any length of time, or with any level of intensity, will lead to knowing that person, as an individual, and therefore to a deeper level of caring relationship. This is especially true, as Hamington suggests, where care is embodied, so that a caregiver comes to know a person through communication at an intercorporeal level.

However, if we’re talking about the informal or intimate care that takes place between loved ones, such as the care of a parent for a child, or an adult child for their elderly parents (see this post), then in these cases there is surely a close connection between caring about and, if not directly caring for, then certainly ‘taking care of’ (the second phase in Tronto’s sequence), in the sense of ‘taking up responsibility to meet care needs’.

In her 2015 book Sacrifice: A Care-Ethical Reappraisal of Sacrifice and Self-Sacrifice, the Dutch care theorist Inge van Nistelrooij, who was my guest in Episode 17 of the Careful Thinking podcast, draws on the work of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion to argue that there are some ‘calls’ to care about which we have very little choice or control. As Inge said in the episode, the decision to care for another person is ‘sometimes developed by finding yourself in situations, by receiving appeals of others, by being affected by the suffering of others’. She continued:

So then it’s not about your choice, so much as by…finding yourself in a situation in which you still might have to make a choice. But sometimes it’s impossible to make that choice, because you’re the only one who needs to do something, to rescue somebody or to help or comfort somebody.

From birth onwards, and throughout our lives, we find ourselves implicated in relationships of mutual or reciprocal care. Indeed, our very existence is the result (ideally) of a relationship of care between two people, and we are unable to survive and thrive in the early years of life without their care, or that of other caregivers, which involves us inescapably in reciprocal responsibilities to care for those who have cared for us, when the need arises. But even going beyond our immediate families, at every stage of life we find ourselves always-already in communities or networks of mutual responsibility to care for those whom we know and therefore care about.

This puts me in mind of the words of J.D.Vance which I included at the top of this post, and which he articulated in a media interview in early 2025, immediately drawing a good deal of critical commentary, including some from his fellow Christians. One Catholic commentator acknowledged that ‘of course, we do not neglect our families’ but argued that ‘framing love as something calculated and conditional misses the heart of it entirely’ and suggested that ‘love has no limits’. However, to be fair to Vance (not a phrase that comes easily to me), I wonder if what he said was really so unreasonable. After all, he didn’t actually say ‘love your families and the rest of the world can go hang’, but rather love those closest to you first, then your neighbours and members of your local community, ‘and after that, prioritise the rest of the world’. Isn’t that order of caring priorities something that most people would agree with and act on in their own lives? And haven’t we all encountered people who, rather like Mrs Jellyby in Dickens’ Bleak House, love ‘the world’ but neglect the needs of those closer to home?

Finally, though, I wonder if this opposition between caring for those who are known to us and those who are unknown or less known is actually a false one. A theme that has come up again and again, as I’ve spoken with care theorists and practitioners on the Careful Thinking podcast, is the way in which interpersonal care for a loved one can nurture a care for the wider community, for humanity, and indeed for the more-than-human. In Episode 11, James Thompson, author of the ground-breaking Care Aesthetics: for Artful Care and Careful Art, clarified that when this takes place, ‘it’s not about role-taking, so it’s not by caring for my child I develop the role of carer and then I go to another setting and that role of carer is replayed in that other setting.’ He continued:

Actually, it’s about our capacity...to be aware of the sensory worlds we live in, and to be aware of the way we use our bodies...we use the different sensory capacities we have in relation to other people. And by practising those, and being attentive to those in different environments, it is more likely we are sensitive to other environments and other worlds.

This sense of caring as an embodied education, a process in which engaging in intercorporeal care deepens and extends one’s capacity to care beyond the interpersonal, once again echoes Hamington’s argument in Care Ethics and Beyond. In Episode 22 of the podcast, disability researcher Melody Escobar described how the mothers in her research study developed a sense of care and responsibility for the wider community precisely as the result of caring for their own disabled children. As Melody said:

Caregiving, particularly for a child with a disability, often does widen one’s sense of responsibility to others and to equity. The mothers weren’t just focused on the needs of their own children. Over time, their caregiving led them to speak before legislatures and school boards and faith communities to advocate for access and meaningful change for all persons who experience discrimination. So their love grew into something expansive...This study and my own experience has helped me recognise that caregiving can indeed transform us into more caring citizens and invites us all to bring about a more just and compassionate world.

Nel Noddings makes a similar point, arguing that in the course of our lives we learn ‘first what it means to be cared for, then to care for intimate others, and finally to care about those we cannot care for directly’. In a sense, Noddings reverses Tronto’s sequence, describing the experience of ‘caring for’ as leading to ‘caring about’, though she uses the latter term rather differently, to denote a sense of wider social responsibility.

       From L to R: Nel Noddings, Inge van Nistelrooij, James Thompson, Melody Escobar

If caring for those who are known to us can lead to caring about those who are unknown, then perhaps the late Pope John Paul II was right to suggest, in my other initial quote, that it is not so much the ‘knownness’ of the other that should inspire our ‘love’ for them, but rather their very personhood, and that the human person - any person, not just those close to us - is ‘the kind of good towards which the only proper and adequate attitude is love’. Or, we might say, care.

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The header image for this post is the painting ‘Love Knows No Limit’ by Trudie Tara Moulton. I’m grateful to Trudie for kindly giving me permission to use the image.

Episode 27 of the Careful Thinking podcast features my conversation with Iris Parra Jounou, an assistant professor of philosophy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Iris was awarded a PhD in 2025 for her thesis entitled ‘Dying in the Relaissance: End of Life Practices in a Caring Democracy’. She previously studied for bachelor’s degrees in nursing and humanities and for a master’s degree in contemporary thought and classical tradition.

Iris has published journal articles and book chapters on end-of-life care and assisted dying, and she also has the distinction of having translated key works by the leading American care ethicist Joan Tronto into Catalan. Iris is the editor of a new volume in the Peeters Ethics of Care series on Care Ethics and Public Health which (with perfect timing) was published just as I was finalising this post. She is also a poet and a musician.

                                                             Iris Parra Jounou

Iris contributed a chapter on ‘a care ethics and aesthetics approach to stillbirth and late termination of pregnancy for foetal anomalies’, to the recently-published edited collection Care Aesthetics and the Arts, which I reviewed in my last post, and to which other previous guests on the podcast, including James Thompson (Episode 11) and Alisha Ibkar (Episode 25), also contributed. Since my own most recent empirical research was with fathers who had experienced the loss of a child through stillbirth or neonatal death (see these posts), I was particularly interested to hear about this piece of work. And as someone with an interest in the intersection of care ethics and literature, I was also keen to talk with Iris about her focus in this chapter on a literary memoir as a vehicle for exploring care-related issues.

Last December, I wrote a post about the often overlooked developments in care theory happening in southern Europe, and I highlighted Barcelona and Catalonia as a particularly fertile hub of contemporary scholarship on care. Iris’ innovative research, using feminist care ethics as a lens to explore the complex issues surrounding care at the end of life, is a particularly impressive example of those developments. And her more recent work, exploring the ways in which care ethics might inform social policy, makes an important contribution to the debate around the role of government in care, which I wrote about in this recent post.

The topic of end-of-life care is one I’ve explored in a number of earlier episodes of the podcast: for example, in my conversations with Xavier Symons in Episode 2, with the late Ruth Groenhout in Episode 5, with Carlo Leget in Episode 8 and with Erica Borgstrom in Episode 9. In all of those episodes we touched on the contentious question of assisted dying, and in this post I summarised what each of my guests had to say on the subject. That issue is still very much alive in the public domain: here in the UK, the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill is currently being scrutinised by the House of Lords, while in countries that have already legislated for medical assistance in dying (MAiD), high-profile cases continue to attract controversy. Iris has been involved in pioneering studies of assisted dying, interviewing both health professionals and patients requesting MAiD, and I was interested to hear her insights into this, as well as the other important issues at the heart of her research.

                                      Iris’ Catalan translations of Joan Tronto’s books

We began our conversation on the podcast by exploring Iris’ personal and professional journey to the work she’s now doing, including her experience as a nurse and her transition into academic research. Iris described how her interest in researching death, dying and end-of-life care grew out of the experience of witnessing death in both her personal and professional life. We then talked about Iris’ introduction to feminist care ethics, and how she drew on that framework in her doctoral research to illuminate contemporary attitudes to death and to develop an ‘expressive-collaborative model of mortality’. Joan Tronto’s writing, in particular, has obviously been a key influence on Iris’ thinking, and Iris described how she came to interview Joan and to translate two of her books into Catalan.

Turning to the subject of assisted dying, we discussed Iris’ research with people requesting MAiD and with health professionals faced with having to implement it, as well as her advocacy for a patient-centred definition of what counts as unbearable suffering at the end of life. Iris then talked about the volume she’s recently edited and about her own co-written chapter in the book arguing for a ‘public ethics of care.’ We moved on to discussing the chapter Iris has contributed to Care Aesthetics and the Arts, which prompted me to ask about her own artistic activities as a musician and a poet. Finally, Iris mentioned some of the other publications that she has in the pipeline, and her plans for publishing her PhD thesis as a book.

                                          A collection of Iris’ poetry, published in 2023

Here are some quotes by Iris from our conversation:

I would say [my thesis includes] a very brief, modest cultural history of death and dying in the European context...And so I came up with these three b’s...one was banalisation, and that was related to the idea of death as a taboo, but then how virtual deaths are intertwined with real deaths and we’re not able to identify them as real anymore...And then biotechnification was also a change in the definition of death itself with organ transplantation, the idea of brain death, and how all these possibilities in technifying biology or healthcare were also affecting how we understood death and the limits of what can be done with death. And it also changed the physical spaces in which we were in contact with death...And then bureaucratisation was more related to what happens with the body after you die. And it was more related to...legal aspects...that constrain your possibilities regarding what you want to do once you die…And then about this neoliberal ideology. So, by that what I meant is that idea of the quest for immortality, all this eternal youth and so on, and there’s huge amounts of money being put into those ideas....I did research on who was behind post-human knowledge and all...these people being cryogenised and all these things...So there’s some kind of connection between this massive amount of money trying to find a cure for death itself...and a certain neoliberal discourse that for me was related to basically the idea that if you have money enough, you can do whatever you want to.

...

The relaissance was a way for me to frame some sort of utopian desire or an idea...not utopian in the classical sense but...an education of a desire for a different way of being and living in the world...So relaissance, for me, the name itself is...a new beginning based on...relationality, but also relying on others. So it keeps both senses. And again, it was not [that] we are already there. It was more...it could be the beginning of something different in which we could frame death and dying and our societies themselves. Because again, there’s been a lot of new developments in how we can understand relationality in many different senses, also with the environment or other species and so on. And I think that was like a way to mark a turning-point in our way of thinking about ourselves, but at the same time, just to pinpoint a future possibility, saying we can go this way…as an option for the future.

...

We interviewed 15 different people in Spain who were facing their last days or weeks. And it’s something very impressive to be just there in a very intimate moment with a completely strange person. But it was very, very rewarding...MAiD sometimes is understood as a very egoistical practice in which...this is my autonomy, it’s my decision and so I’m going to do it, and...I don’t care about everyone else around...And we just wanted to frame this in a different sense. So we analysed how people were explaining their relationship with family, with healthcare professionals, with broader social circles and friends, and so on. And what we found is that...this could also be framed as a relational practice of care. So choosing MAiD instead of another practice is not just something that you do for yourself...but it also considers other people’s needs and it also frames the person who’s going to die as an active carer of some other people too, which is something that you never find in the literature. It’s usually them and the family needing care, not providing care. And so for me that was a different way to frame MAiD also as a practice.

...

Having the opportunity to interview at the same time patients and professionals was nice, because you could see the same problems from different perspectives. And so from the healthcare professional side...we had the impression that it was not an either ‘yes’ or ‘no, but...it’s basically a context-dependent decision...And...we tried to develop four different positions. The one that is completely in favour all the time, the one that is completely against it all the time. And then these two categories that were the most interesting ones, because you could make it easier or more difficult for them to be part of it or not....We were also interested in...what are called ‘crypto’ objections, which are external things that also affect your decision but are not related to conscience itself. It’s not the deep, moral controversial issue that you’re having, but overload, you don’t know how the system works, you don’t have time, you’re not well accompanied while doing this. And so those were also things that could be changed and so make it much more easier for both healthcare professionals and patients wanting to access MAiD for the implementation of the law.

...

We were again seeing that patient definitions were not really taken into account in how suffering could be identified by healthcare professionals. And then you have two different options. You can say, well, suffering is a deeply subjective experience. And so you cannot go into that, you cannot analyse that, you cannot say if that’s enough or not for another person and so on... and then there’s the other option in which you have to get to an agreement between the patient and the healthcare professional. And so we were just trying to make sense of [whether] in this agreement both parties are equally recognised…But we wanted to problematise some aspects of what happens when healthcare professionals have the possibility in their hands to allow someone to die or not…it’s a very complicated topic...but we just wanted to bring the patient’s perspective on that.

...

So that paper [in Care Ethics and Public Health] was co-authored by Txetxu Ausín, who is an expert on…democratic governance and public participation…So he had a lot of ideas on what happened with the public administration and how care can be also included there when you develop policies…We came up with this idea of trying to analyse different levels in which this could be implemented or thought about. So the local one in towns, for example, then the regional one, for us it’s autonomous communities…and then at the national or state level…And so we wanted to analyse how different policies could be framed based on a care ethics or a care framework…like feminist care economics…So Txetxu comes from the Basque country, and there was…an agreement which is called something like the Basque Pact for Care…one of their ideas was civil servants working for the administration should attend a course on care ethics….so that was just an example. But if you go to Latin America, for example, there’s a lot of work also being developed there.

…

I had to stop singing in 2016 due to a problem in my vocal cords, so it was also kind of a grieving for me, because it was something that I did for several years, and I had a band and we went on stage, and I really love those things. But I had the opportunity this last semester to teach a philosophy course for first years in musicology. And it was very interesting to try to analyse music from a philosophical perspective...And I had a really wonderful time with them. It was very interesting to dive deep more on that. And I also used at least a couple of classes to talk about ethics related to music and these things...So it was fun to include some of the ideas of relationality...but on how we connect with music and so on...and my other side is poetry, and that’s something I still do, but I would say I don’t usually over-theorise my artistic practices. And I believe that they are just two different languages that I have to just try to answer questions that are important for me. And I’ve tried not to reunite them much because I tend to overthink things and I want some parts of my life to keep not overthought.

You can listen to the whole episode here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can download a transcript of the episode here:

Careful Thinking Episode 27 Iris Pj Transcript Final

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The header image for this post is the painting ‘Ya se ha dormido’ (‘He is already asleep’), 1986, by Catalan artist Fina Miralles Nobell (b.1950). © Fina Miralles

It’s only February, but this year has already seen the publication of two important new books about care. Among the most exciting recent developments in care theory have been the growth of the new field of care aesthetics (see these posts) and the increasing attention being given to non-western perspectives on care (see these posts). In very different ways these new volumes make significant contributions to those developments.

Care Aesthetics and the Arts, edited by Kate Maguire-Rosier, Réka Polonyi and James Thompson, is the second book in Routledge’s Studies in Care Aesthetics series (the first being James’ ground-breaking Care Aesthetics: for artful care and careful art, published in 2023). The book actually appeared at the end of last year (and I mentioned it briefly in my post about care books of 2025), but as its official publication date is 2026, I can perhaps be excused for describing it as new for the purposes of this post.

Care Ethics and Beyond: Moral, Epistemological and Cross-Cultural Perspectives, edited by Seisuke Hayakawa and Michael Slote, was published last month as part of the Palgrave Studies in Comparative East-West Philosophy. It’s a very different kind of book, in both subject-matter and style, from Care Aesthetics and the Arts, though there are some surprising parallels and overlaps between the two volumes, which I explore below.

Care Aesthetics and the Arts emerged from the innovative work of the Care Aesthetics: Research Exploration (CARE) project in Manchester, led by James Thompson, who was my guest in Episode 11 of the Careful Thinking podcast, while the book’s other co-editors are also core members of the project team. According to its introductory chapter, the book seeks to ‘lay out how care aesthetics connects to artistic practices...we illustrate the relations between the arts, aesthetics, health and care and how these inform the distinction we seek to make between care aesthetics and other frameworks such as “arts in health”’.

                           L to R: James Thompson, Kate Maguire-Rosier, Réka Polonyi

The book is divided into five parts, plus three ‘artistic interludes’ and a postscript, and it’s generously illustrated with photos and drawings from the activities discussed. Despite its roots in a UK-based project, the volume has an international feel and includes several chapters about practice in Australia, with the Netherlands, Spain, Singapore, Chile, India and Canada also represented among the contributions. Besides James, other author names that will be familiar to Careful Thinking listeners include Maurice Hamington, my guest in Episode 6 of the podcast, who contributed the preface, and Alisha Ibkar, who featured in Episode 25, and whose chapter explores the aesthetics of the everyday care practices of women at a protest site in Delhi, India. Iris Parra Jounou, who I interviewed recently for a future episode of the podcast, also has a chapter in the book, discussing the experience of stillbirth through the medium of a literary memoir.

Each of the chapters in the book is based around an example of contemporary artistic practice that intersects in some way with care. A rich variety of art forms is represented, though the largest number focus on theatrical or performance practices, a few on dance and movement, and a couple on music, with the visual arts less well represented. However, making categorisations of this kind seems inimical to the interdisciplinary spirit of the book: the editors state that they originally organised the book around different art forms, but abandoned this structure when they realised that ‘the debates between them might be illustrated through a more thematic structure’.

From the embarrassment of riches provided by this diverse and engaging volume, it seems invidious to pick out favourites chapters. However, I was particularly intrigued by the two essays on music, and especially by music therapist Stuart Wood’s contribution on ‘found performance’, which (among other things) explores the soundscape of everyday life in a care home, and sets out to develop a ‘musical methodology of care’. Just recently I’ve become interested in the connections between care ethics and the work of galleries and museums (if you share that interest, I warmly recommend Nuala Morse’s ground-breaking 2021 book The Museum as a Space of Social Care), so I was keen to read Nadine Holdsworth’s chapter on ‘curating and caring for the histories and material culture of homelessness’ at London’s Museum of Homelessness. The chapters on movement practices with differently disabled/abled performers were also thought-provoking and reminded me of similar discussions in Christine Leroy’s recent book Kinaesthetic Empathy, Ethics and Care: A Phenomenology of Dance, which I reviewed here, and of my conversation with Christine in Episode 7 of the podcast. The section of the book on ‘maintaining’ particularly interested me, in part because it was concerned less with ‘the arts’ as conventionally understood and more with what James Thompson has described as the ‘sensory and embodied practices’ of everyday care. Alisha’s chapter appears in this section, as does an intriguing essay by Sophie Bourgault on ‘the careful art of maintaining (public) things’, drawing on Wim Wenders’ film Perfect Days, about the seemingly uneventful life of a Tokyo toilet-cleaner.

Although most of the chapters in the book are based around collective or public activities, one or two are more personal and reflective, and I particularly appreciated the artistic interlude on ‘care anaesthesia’ by the historian and curator Myna Trustram, in which she meditates on the aesthetic aspects of her experiences of giving and receiving care. I also like the way the book ends with a postscript, in the form of a letter to the editors from Sophie Dixon and her autistic ten-year-old son Fred, describing the imaginative games they play together on their daily journey to school, as a way of managing Fred’s anxiety. In his conversation with me on the podcast, James Thompson quoted Sophie’s suggestion that creating relationships of care is all about ‘finding the game’. That might stand as a neat encapsulation of the connections between ‘care, play and artfulness’ (to quote James again) that Care Aesthetics and the Arts as a whole seeks to uncover.

                                          Michael Slote and Seisuke Hayakawa

Care Aesthetics and the Arts is very much grounded in artistic and care practice, which isn’t to say that its authors’ critical reflections don’t also advance the theory of care aesthetics in significant ways. However, in its focus on cutting-edge philosophical questions, Care Ethics and Beyond has a rather more abstract tone. The book had its origins in a 2023 conference on ‘Exploring new dimensions of empathy and care ethics’ at the University of Tokyo, where one of its co-editors, Seisuke Hayakawa, teaches, while the other editor, Michael Slote, who is based at the University of Miami, is well known in the West for his work on the ethics of care and empathy. Unsurprisingly, given these beginnings, there is a real sense of an ongoing dialogue in the book, with authors frequently referring to each others’ work. The debate continues right to the end of Care Ethics and Beyond, with the first appendix by Slote prompting a final response from his co-editor Hayakawa.

According to its Introduction, the book ‘significantly expands our intellectual understanding of care and the ethics of care by presenting essays across three key areas: (1) those enriching care ethics with Chinese and Japanese philosophical insights, (2) those building connections between caring and epistemology, and (3) those providing insights into the moral dimensions of care in practice’. The editors note that the contributors to the book ‘come from both East and West’ and they express the hope ‘that the present volume may help to do something toward encouraging more East/West collaboration in future [and] bridge the philosophical gap between Western and Eastern philosophical thinking’. In fact, most of the contributors are from the East, a majority being Japanese, with just a handful of authors from North America.

For me, the most revelatory section of the book was the first one, which brings key concepts from Japanese and Chinese philosophy into dialogue with care ethics. Michael Slote’s chapter on the relevance for care theory of the Chinese concepts of yin and yang, and Yukiko Kuwayama’s essay on the Chinese/Japanese concept of ki/qi, reminded me of my conversation with artist and care theorist Merel Visse in Episode 21 of the podcast, in which she spoke about the influence on her thinking of French philosopher François Jullien’s attempt to bridge the gap between European and Chinese thought. And for those of us who went through a Zen phase in our youth, Yuko Ishihara’s chapter in this section, applying the Zen Buddhist philosophy of dialogue to care ethics, is also of particular interest.

I also found the second part of the book, on the epistemology of care, helpful in thinking through the relationship between knowledge and care, a topic that continues to engage me and which I’d like to explore further in a future post. The opening chapter in this section is by Vrinda Dalmiya, whose 2016 book Caring to Know: Comparative Care Ethics, Feminist Epistemology, and the Mahābhārata, was pioneering in the way it drew upon feminist ideas and traditional Indian ethics to analyse the connections between caring and knowing. Vrinda’s chapter in this book makes frequent reference to Maurice Hamington’s work on embodied care, and Maurice himself has contributed a chapter exploring the ‘veridictive force of embodied care’. Maurice’s is one of the more accessible chapters in the book: like much of his writing, it uses a narrative case study, in this case the racist murder of Emmett Till in 1955 and the moral impact of the public display of his mutilated corpse, to explore the idea of the body as an ‘epistemic resource’. I also like the way Maurice acknowledges his debt to the work of younger scholars, including one or two who have appeared on Careful Thinking: referring for example, to Ira Chadha-Sridhar’s (Episode 15) notion of care as a ‘thick’ ethical concept, and to Christine Leroy’s (Episode 7) theory of kinaesthetic empathy .

The final section of the book, on ‘the practice of care, empathy, and respect’, includes several chapters in which Japanese scholars critique the work of Western philosophical thinkers. Some of the contributions in this part are also more ‘applied’, such as the essay on ‘empathic knowing and the completion of care’ by Georgina Campelia and Aaron Wightman, who are based in a school of medicine in Seattle: their chapter includes vignettes from clinical practice and a section on ‘epistemology at the bedside’. And I was interested to read Filipino-Japanese researcher Anton Sevilla-Liu’s chapter in this last section on ‘caring amidst woundedness’, which explores the differences between Eastern and Western notions of rationality, drawing on the ideas of the twentieth-century Japanese ethicist Watsuji Tetsurō, and making interesting comparisons between Watsuji’s thinking and that of pioneering feminist care theorist Nell Noddings. This was of particular interest to me, as I’ve been immersed recently in the work of the contemporary French philosopher Corine Pelluchon (about whom I’ll perhaps say more another time), whose éthique de la vulnérabilité and éthique de la considération are indebited to Watsuji’s challenge to the separation in Western thought between the individual and environment.

Despite their obvious differences in aims and approach, there are a number of intriguing points of connection between these two new books. At the most obvious level, there is an overlap in authorship. As already mentioned, Maurice Hamington features in both books. The eminent Canadian care theorist Fiona Robinson also contributes chapters to both volumes, her focus in both instances being the global politics of care: she writes about a theatre project at a refugee camp in Calais in the first book and contributes a more theoretical discussion of feminist epistemology and international relations in the second. Other echoes of Care Aesthetics and the Arts in Care Ethics and Beyond include Tetsuya Kono’s references to Noh theatre and Japanese theatrical theory, in a chapter on the role of distancing in relationships of care. The link between between care and play is another subject discussed, in very different ways, in both books: Réka Polonyi’s chapter in Care Aesthetics and the Arts explores ‘care, unruliness and play’ and develops what she calls a ‘playgroundology’, while in her chapter in Care Ethics and Beyond, Yuko Ishihara writes about what Zen Buddhist philosophy might contribute to a care ethics of play. Both chapters reminded me of Czech philosopher Petr Urban’s work on play and democracy, and his call, when talking with me in Episode 4 of Careful Thinking, for more research that brings together art, play and care. Finally, Maurice’s chapter in Care Ethics and Beyond has a section on embodied care as a ‘curator mode of existence’, which makes intriguing connections between interpersonal care and the care for art works by museum and gallery curators.

Both of these new books are rich with fresh insights into the ethics and aesthetics of care, and both in their different ways advance care theory and deepen and broaden our understanding of the nature of care. Given that, it’s a pity that academic books like these are so expensive and therefore beyond the resources of many care practitioners: for example, Care Ethics and Beyond is only available as a hardback for £119.99 in the UK, and even the eBook costs £95.50. Credit is due, then, to Routledge (prompted by the book’s editors?) for making Care Aesthetics and the Arts immediately available as an attractively-designed paperback, at the slightly more reasonable price of £41.99 (compared to £155.00 for the hardback), and also for including an open access digital version. Let’s hope other publishers follow this example: these debates about care are too important to remain confined to the academy.

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Footnote

Both of the books reviewed here are beautifully produced, though I was amused to see that, in one of the bibliographies in Care Ethics and Beyond, the eminent American care ethicist Joan Tronto’s name had been misspelt as ‘Joan Toronto’. This amused me because the transcription software that I use for the Careful Thinking podcast often makes the same mistake with Joan’s name. It also tends to have difficulties transcribing the words ‘care ethics’: recent versions have included ‘keritics’ and ‘keryotics’. And the best one yet, earlier today: ‘career athletics’ !

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The header image is the left panel of a scene from the Noh play Yorobōshi (弱法師), painted by Shimomura Kanzan in 1915 (Tokyo National Museum).

What is the role of government in care? Should the state take greater responsibility for organising and providing care, or does experience show that the less politicians are involved in care the better? In short, can (and should) the state care?

These questions have been simmering away in the background of a number of recent episodes of the Careful Thinking podcast, so in this post I thought I’d pull together the diversity of views expressed by my podcast guests, in the hope of casting some light on the issue and stimulating discussion and debate.

In the most recent episode of the podcast, the legal scholar Erika Bachiochi expressed her admiration for the work of the feminist care theorist Eva Kittay, and especially her classic text Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency. However, Erika also criticised Kittay for seeming to regard the state as the ‘optimal’ provider of care and for resorting to state provision as ‘the first step’ in responding to a perceived deficit of care in families and communities. I must admit that I hadn’t noticed this tendency in Kittay’s writing as much as in the work of some other feminist care ethicists. For example, I recall reading Joan Tronto’s influential book Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice when it was first published in 2013, and while I found myself in sympathy with Tronto’s emphasis on the centrality of care to human experience, I was wary of the book’s implied message that solving the current crisis in care was mainly the responsibility of governments, and that the state should play a more active and interventionist role in the provision of care.

In my conversation with her on the podcast, Erika Bachiochi offered an alternative analysis, drawing on the work of the legal scholar and diplomat Mary Ann Glendon:

One way [Glendon] puts it, I think is really helpful, is that in modern thinking we tend to have the individual, the market and the state, and those are the three actors. And we forget entirely about the family and the work of care in the family...but even some scholars who think about care a lot tend to want to talk about like, care infrastructure or care architecture. And they move directly from like the need for care straight up into the political and economic realm or the market and the state and really maybe give short shrift to the family.

There’s an echo here of Robert Putnam’s argument, in books like Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, that in contemporary western societies the intermediate zone between the individual and the state – consisting of families, and civic and community associations – has increasingly been hollowed out. One result is that people tend to look more and more to the state – to the political realm – to solve their problems.

Mary Ann Glendon maintained that, rather than extending its own role in the provision of care, the state should introduce stronger measures to support families to care. As Erika said, ‘we really ought to be thinking a lot more about the family unit as a whole and the needs that the family has and the way in which the state can support that really important work of care.’ Of course, this is itself an acknowledgement that the state has a significant role to play in care, but as a facilitator and supporter rather than as the principal provider.

In talking with Erika, I was reminded of my conversation in an earlier episode of the podcast with political theorist and disability scholar Lorraine Krall McCrary. Lorraine explained how her own thinking had been influenced by Catholic social teaching, in which the principle of solidarity with the vulnerable is balanced by the principle of subsidiarity, according to which ‘government should support, assist and guide smaller associations rather than destroy and absorb them’, allowing individuals and associations freedom to act and ‘empowering a multiplicity of associations and approaches rather than standardising them’. Lorraine expressed a more positive view of feminist care ethics than Erika, suggesting that ‘the ethic of care approach often holds up as a model subsidiarity, or something like it, esteeming particular relationships of care and cautioning against care becoming bureaucratised, while seeing a need for government support of caregiving relationships, and for providing aid where those caregiving relationships do not exist, where people are left out.’ Lorraine identified ‘a recognition in care ethics that making care happen at the national level loses the interactions between individuals, the particularity, the listening that is really essential to care.’ At the same time, she recognised that the communities of care that she studied in her research depended on government funding and require government oversight: ‘And more than that...there are people who fall through the cracks in communities’, so that ‘there is a role for the state in care.’ She added: ‘I think the state is oversight, support, encouragement [and] the responsibility to help make a ground in which new communities can grow.’

Another disability researcher, Melody Escobar, who was my guest in Episode 22 of the podcast, and who like both Erika and Lorraine, has been influenced by Catholic social thought, came at the question from the opposite direction. On the basis of her research with parents of disabled children, Melody suggested that the experience of caregiving at the familial level ‘often does widen one’s sense of responsibility to others and to equity’ and can inspire an involvement in political action to support care. Lorraine described how the mothers in her study ‘weren’t just focused on the needs of their own children’ and how ‘over time, their caregiving led them to speak before legislatures and school boards and faith communities to advocate for access and meaningful change for all persons who experience discrimination’ - in other words, for state action to support care.

      Unpaid carers in the UK staging a virtual protest to demand a right to respite care 
                                  ( Social Care Today, 21.07.25)

Melody went on to argue that ‘without practical supports and services [from government], even the most devoted caregiving becomes exhausting and unsustainable’, giving as an example ‘the need for accessible respite care, periods of rest which emerge strongly in the mothers’ stories, not only for the caregivers, but also for the children with disabilities who benefit from a break from the routine of daily life, experiencing new activities or forming connections with others outside the home’. She concluded: ‘So to truly support these families, I think care has to be seen not as the sole responsibility of individuals, but as something shared, backed by systems, services and communities that recognise the dignity and value of long-term caregiving.’

So, in different ways and with differing degrees of emphasis, all three of these Catholic writers share a sense that the state does have a significant role to play in care, though its primary function is to create and support the conditions for others to care, and only to become directly involved when care needs exceed the capacity of families and communities, or when, in Lorraine’s words, people ‘fall through the cracks’.

                     L to R: Erika Bachiochi, Lorraine Krall McCrary, Melody Escobar

However, other guests on Careful Thinking have argued for a more interventionist role for the state in care. Another legal scholar, Ira Chadha-Sridhar, argued in Episode 15 that ‘the state can use its powers to sometimes enforce moral responsibilities of care that we owe to co-citizens.’ Ira maintained that ‘when we have laws that encapsulate a genuine kind of moral responsibility to care, in those cases there is a moral duty to obey the law.’ She positioned herself against the libertarian tradition, according to which ‘the state...cannot use its coercive power to require that people act in order to meet each other’s needs’, maintaining instead that ‘the state can use its powers to sometimes enforce moral responsibilities of care that we owe to co-citizens.’

In one of the earliest episodes of the podcast, I challenged the social anthropologist Nigel Rapport’s assertion that the state, or at least its institutions, could be ‘caring’. In response, Nigel argued that what he called ‘cosmopolitan love’ has the potential to motivate ‘a kind of cosmopolitan politesse, a code of engagement that I would also claim that societies and governments and institutions might also take on’, and he maintained that ‘this kind of ethos might be turned into social policy and social practice’. Nigel held up the British National Health Service as an example of a ‘caring’ state institution, arguing that ‘care, as it’s practised by the NHS, is a kind of loving engagement of dealing with strangers...and this I take to be one example of how an institution might be caring’.

The philosopher and care theorist Maurice Hamington gives a chapter in his recent book Revolutionary Care: Commitment and Ethos what he admits is the rather provocative title ‘Socialism and the caring economy’. But rather than a government takeover of care, what Maurice is arguing for here is ‘an economy that makes a substantial investment in caring infrastructure to meet the needs of its citizens’ and supports a diversity of collective initiatives at different levels in society. As Maurice said when we discussed this question in Episode 6 of the podcast:

One thing about the care revolution that I envisioned [in the book] is that it’s all directions. And so it’s not just a bottom-up revolution and it’s not a top-down revolution. It’s an all-direction revolution. And so....I’m talking about socialism and the practices of infrastructure and so forth that a government can take. I also...discuss mutual aid and...more communitarian kinds of activities....And let’s do it all...we’re not going to rely on one caring saviour to put this all into place. We can push care at all levels, in all directions. And so on the one hand, for example, charity can be caring, but you still want to change the system so that less charity is even necessary. And both can be true.

To illustrate his point, Maurice recalled that he was ‘always impressed, growing up, with the Catholic Worker movement, because Dorothy Day and her organisation at one level would have soup kitchens and at another level would be protesting and trying to change policy at the same time, and they didn’t feel like their mission was just to do one kind of thing.’

                   From L to R: Ira Chadha-Sridhar, Nigel Rapport, Maurice Hamington

That brings us full circle back to Catholic social teaching, of which Day and the Catholic Worker were an exemplary embodiment. Perhaps, as Maurice suggests, acknowledging that the state has a vital role to play in care doesn’t necessarily mean (as traditional socialists might maintain) that it has an exclusive role, but that it is one player (and a more or less significant player, depending on your viewpoint) in a mixed economy of care. At the same time, as Erika Bachiochi, Lorraine Krall McCrary and Melody Escobar all in their different ways argue, a belief that care happens best at the local level – in families and communities – doesn’t rule out maintaining that caregivers need the support of the state to enable and facilitate their caregiving.

      Opening session of the launch of the interministerial working group set up to develop 
                  Brazil’s National Care Policy (via https://agenciabelem.com.br)

These are very much ‘live’ issues at the moment, including here on Substack. I’ve been very interested to read Mélina Magdelénat’s recent reporting at The Fifth Wave Institute, on how national and local governments in Latin American countries have put in place structures to support care, partnering with community organisations rather than seeking to replace them. It reminded me of what the philosopher and care theorist Irene Comins Mingol told me, when I interviewed her last year, about the concept of cuidadanía (a neologism that blends the Spanish words for care and citizenship) developed by Spanish and Latin American scholars, ‘a form of citizenship grounded in empathy, relational responsibility, and an ethical commitment to others beyond one’s immediate social circles’. And in a forthcoming book chapter, the Catalan researcher Iris Parra Jounou describes how public policies based on care have been implemented by city authorities in Barcelona and Madrid: I’m looking forward to discussing these initiatives with Iris in a forthcoming episode of the podcast (watch this space). What these ideas and initiatives have in common is an attempt to find a new role for the state in care, and to develop a new understanding of the relationship between the state and those who care.

To conclude with the questions with which I began: if we concede that the state does have a significant part to play in care, what exactly is that role? And if we agree that governments’ main role with regard to care is an enabling one - that is, creating the conditions for families and communities to care - then how can they best do it? I’d be interested to hear what you think, so feel free to leave a comment below.

…

The header image is the painting ‘Who Cares’ by Los Angeles-based artist Sonia Mirzaei (permission requested).

Last October, Elissa Strauss (author of When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others, and my guest in Episode 16 of the Careful Thinking podcast) published a post on her Made With Care Substack entitled ‘How to care for parents who don’t want your care’, in which she wrote:

Even with over 18 years of writing and reporting on care under my belt, including a whole book on the subject, I have found myself totally caught off-guard by one particular aspect of caring for adult parents: they don’t always want the care you think they need.

As I commented when I re-stacked Elissa’s post: ‘This is exactly where we are with my parents right now’. We’re fortunate that my Mum and Dad, who are both in their early 90s, are still with us. But they are increasingly frail, and at every stage they’ve been reluctant, at least initially, to accept the measures we’ve suggested to ensure their safety and wellbeing, whether that’s help with housework or with personal care.

Recently we reached a critical stage. Following a series of falls, which led to night-time call-outs to one or other of my brothers, who live closer to our parents than I do, my Dad had a particularly bad fall which resulted in a nasty head wound and a stay in hospital over Christmas. Luckily, there was no internal damage, but it led us to conclude that he really needs twenty-four-hour care, to ensure that he doesn’t suffer any worse injuries in future. To begin with, Dad was adamant that he didn’t want this, claiming that he would never be able to relax with a stranger living in the house. But now that he’s back home, and the carer is in place, he’s come round to acknowledging that he couldn’t really manage without her.

Then, just last week, it was my mother’s turn to take a tumble, landing her in hospital and needing an operation for a fractured hip. So far, things seem to be going well, though her recovery is likely to be slow. We’re just thankful that we’d already organised the live-in carer, despite Mum’s and Dad’s protests, so at least there’s someone at home to take care of Dad.

                                                          Image via Shutterstock

In trying to understand my parents’ resistance to being looked after, I’ve been reflecting on how hard it must be to allow yourself to become dependent on others. I imagine it’s particularly difficult to accept an offer of care from the children who were once completely dependent on you. As parents, our identity is closely bound up with providing care, and it’s not something that’s easily let go of, even when your children are grown up. And for my Mum and Dad, who’ve had a lifelong, active involvement in their church, which has involved looking after the needs of members less able than themselves, being a caregiver has probably been especially important to their sense of who they are.

Letting go of this lifelong, meaning-giving identity of caregiver, and at the same time taking on the new and often unwanted identity of care receiver, must be a painful process, involving a re-orientation of your own sense of your place in the family and the community. It brings to mind, from a very different context, what some of the participants in our recent research study with bereaved fathers told us, about the additional loss they experienced when their child died - the loss of their identity as fathers, an identity in which they had become deeply invested, but which was now denied them.

The process of admitting to a need for care, certainly for older people, also involves the acceptance that you are no longer as capable as you once were, or that you still like to think you are. Linked to this is a very natural desire not to impose your needs on others, and especially not your own children. I’ve lost track of the number of times my Dad has told us that he doesn’t want to be a ‘burden’. None of us do, especially not to our loved ones. But as Jeremy McLellan writes, in an article about welcoming people with intellectual disabilities into public spaces, ‘we are all burdens...we were once burdens, and we will be burdens again.’ Or as the philosopher and care ethicist Eva Feder Kittay expressed it in her classic text Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency, ‘dependency is inescapable in the life history of each individual’. Kittay continues:

The immaturity of infancy and early childhood, illness and disability that renders one non-functional even in the most accommodating surroundings, and the fragility of advanced old age, each serve as examples of such inescapable dependency...These are unassailable facts about human existence.

In her recent book The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto (see these posts), Leah Libresco Sargeant suggests that ‘our need is what makes us human’, though she contends that we live in a world where ‘what makes us most human, the dependence in which we all begin our lives, is viewed as strange and passing - a problem to get over.’ Sargeant continues:

For grownups, it can feel like revealing the need for assistance is revealing oneself as childish, something less than a full, free adult human being. We take autonomy as the pattern for human life, with childhood a brief, slightly embarrassing apprenticeship. Little by little, children graduate from their neediness, and, because we expect them to transcend their littleness, we are willing to overlook it and round them up to count as fully human.

At the same time, in order to ensure that there is, in fact, ‘dignity’ in ‘dependence’, it’s important that those on the receiving end of care are able to hold on to a degree of personal autonomy. In her post, Elissa Strauss interviewed clinical psychologist , who suggests some practical ways in which adult children can help their ageing parents to retain a sense of control, even as they accept their need for care, so that ‘the adult child is asking the parent for something, even if it is only permission, and that puts that parent in a giving, rather than receiving, role - much more familiar and comfortable for them.’

     From L to R: Elissa Strauss, Barry J. Jacobs, Eva Feder Kittay, Leah Libresco Sargeant

In addition, at the heart of care ethics is the notion of care as a reciprocal process, which means acknowledging that those on the receiving end of care can also be, in some sense, givers of care. As Eva Kittay writes:

To define dependency work as I have done appears to preclude reciprocal care. In the paradigm case, those who are cared for are unable to care for themselves, and so, one assumes, are incapable of caring for another in this state. But interdependencies of caring relations are not only possible, they are common. Care may be reciprocated simultaneously...A reciprocal arrangement, wherein there is an alternation of roles between the one who does the caring and the one who is cared for, is just a modification of the paradigm case.

Reciprocity in care can take a variety of forms. There’s the situation described by Kittay here, where participants, especially in a long-term relationship, move back and forth between the roles of caregiver and care receiver, or even occupy both roles at the same time. Then there is the common experience of many caregivers that one often gains as much as one gives in a caring relationship. In some cases, the experience of providing care can even be a source of personal healing for the caregiver. I think, again, of the fathers in our recent research study, who had joined football teams set up by and for bereaved men, and who found help with processing their own grief precisely through supporting others going through the same experience. That study brought home to me the inadequacy of the conventional binary understanding of care with which we usually work. Rather than seeing care as a process of one person transmitting something to another, care should perhaps be conceived as an ongoing, reciprocal flow, in which it may sometimes be difficult to determine who is the carer and who the cared for.

            Who is the carer and who the cared for? Image from The Open University course                  
                      ‘Communication and relationships in health and social care’ (2004)

This is the heart of what is meant by relational care. In the very first episode of the Careful Thinking podcast, my former Open University colleague Mary Larkin explained that the relational care with older people that she and her colleagues had been researching ‘represents a move from a one-way flow of care towards mutuality in caring relationships, whereby people aren’t solely givers and receivers’. In the same episode, Mary’s co-researcher Manik Deepak Gopinath explained that relational care settings are designed to ‘maintain people’s need for privacy, for interaction...and in ways that recognise interdependence.’

This sense of what feminist care theorists define as ‘relational autonomy’ can be extremely hard to hold on to as a caregiver or provider of care. Getting the balance right between insisting on care and recognising independence is incredibly difficult, and perhaps, as adult children with ageing parents, we need to stop feeling guilty and acknowledge that we are doing our best in less than ideal circumstances. As Elissa wrote in her post: ‘I know I am not alone. Many of us want to care for our parents, accept the inevitability of dependency and enter the experience with a reserve of patience and goodwill.’

I’ll end with some words that Sarah Rice, a caregiver for her ageing parents, posted the other day on her Care and Wander Instagram page (emphasis added):

No one really prepares you for this part. The watching. The waiting. The quiet ache of realising your parents are living longer than they ever imagined, and now facing decisions they never wanted to make. They didn’t plan to outlive their strength. They never pictured choosing between safety and the home where so many memories live. And you didn’t expect to carry the weight of helping them decide. For adult children, the mental toll is real and heavy. You grieve while they’re still here. You advocate while trying to honour their independence. You hold their fear, their resistance, and their sadness often while hiding your own. They don’t want to leave their home. But they know something has to change. And you’re standing in the middle of love and loss, trying to make the least painful right choice. If this season feels exhausting, confusing, or lonely please know this: you’re not failing. You’re loving them through one of the hardest chapters.

…

The header image for this post is the sculpture ‘Old Love’ by Bozena Happach, a Canadian sculptor of Polish origin (permission requested), who describes this work as follows: ‘Love is universal and does not have age barriers. With age Love tends to be more about caring and expressing emotions. My sculpture was inspired by my parents and in-laws and their love, which did not change with time.’

2025 has been an exceptionally good year for new books about care, with the publication of major edited collections and important new monographs and translations – and with former guests on my Careful Thinking podcast featuring prominently among the authors. In this final post of the year, I look back over twelve months of care-ful reading.

It’s always difficult to know which book to recommend to people who are new to care ethics – and there’s still a need for a good introductory text on the subject. However, anyone wanting to get a sense of the most interesting recent work in the field should certainly take a look at the much-awaited Bloomsbury Handbook of Care Ethics, edited by Matilda Carter, which was published earlier this year. Bringing the theoretical and applied dimensions of care ethics into dialogue with each other, the volume aims to provide ‘an authoritative overview of what care ethics is and the contributions it can make to pressing contemporary problems’. Its twenty-four chapters include contributions from a number of former guests on Careful Thinking, including Petr Urban (Episode 4), Maurice Hamington (Episode 6), Carlo Leget (Episode 8), Inge van Nistelrooij (Episode 17) and Merel Visse (Episode 21), as well as other leading international care scholars such as Michael Slote, Sandra Laugier and Stephanie Collins.

It’s been a productive year for the emerging field of care aesthetics, which views care - in the words of James Thompson, the author of the ground breaking Care Aesthetics: For Artful Care and Careful Art, speaking to me in Episode 11 of the podcast - as a ‘sensory, crafted, embodied practice’. In January, the annual conference of the international Care Ethics Research Consortium, held in Utrecht in the Netherlands, took as its focus ‘Care, Aesthetics, Repair’, and its keynote speakers, alongside James, included other former podcast guests such as Maurice Hamington, Merel Visse, and the French philosopher and dancer Christine Leroy (Episode 7). June saw the publication of an important contribution to the literature on care aesthetics, with the English translation of Christine’s 2021 monograph Phénoménologie de la danse: De la chair à l’éthique. I reviewed Kinaesthetic Empathy, Ethics and Care: A Phenomenology of Dance in this post, describing it as a text that ‘resonates beyond the specificities of dance performance and has relevance for understanding all kinds of aesthetic encounters, and their ethical implications.’

Another significant event this year for the aesthetics of care was the launch of Routledge’s Studies in Care Aesthetics series, with James Thompson’s book as its inaugural publication, while December saw the release of the second book in the series. Care Aesthetics and the Arts, co-edited by James with Réka Polonyi and Kate Maguire-Rosier, is a rich and diverse collection consisting of eighteen chapters by theorists, researchers and practitioners, exploring ‘the emerging field of care aesthetics applied to a range of arts practices and projects’. The contributors include Alisha Ibkar, who was my guest in Episode 25 of the podcast, and Iris Parra Jounou, who is scheduled to be a guest early in 2026, as well as leading care theorists such as Fiona Robinson and Sophie Bourgault, with a preface written by Maurice Hamington. My copy of the book arrived just before Christmas and I’m looking forward to exploring it in the coming weeks.

The Ethics of Care book series, launched in 2010 by the publisher Peeters of Leuven/Louvain, has been extremely influential in shaping the field of care ethics, providing a platform for some of the world’s leading thinkers on care. Until this year, the most recent book in the series was the edited collection Care Ethics, Religion, and Spiritual Traditions, published in 2021 and co-edited by Inge van Nistelrooij, Maurice Hamington and Maureen Sander-Staudt, and featuring chapters by a number of other previous podcast guests, including Steven Steyl (Episode 10), Sarah Munawar (Episode 13) and the late Ruth Groenhout (Episode 5), as well as yours truly. However, after something of a dry spell, 2025 has been a bumper year for the Peeters series, with three new books appearing in print.

The timely Care in an Era of New Technologies and Artificial Intelligence: Relationships in a Connected World, by Vanessa Nurock, Professor of Philosophy at Université Côte d’Azur, France, addresses the ethical and political dimensions of the current technological revolution, arguing that there is a need ‘to articulate an ethics of care and of heightened sensitivity to human relations that is commensurate with the needs of a hyperconnected world’ . You can read a review of the book by Richard Brons at the excellent Ethics of Care website, published by the Foundation Critical Ethics of Care in the Netherlands.

This year also saw the publication by Peeters of Care Work, a major new monograph by the leading French care ethicist Pascale Molinier, whose work I’ve mentioned in a number of recent posts. Based on an in-depth study in a Paris nursing home, the book explores the ethical dimensions of working in the care sector, bringing psychology and moral philosophy into dialogue with the voices of care workers.

When I interviewed the Dutch care ethicist Inge van Nistelrooij for Episode 17 of Careful Thinking, she mentioned the forthcoming collection that she was co-editing with her doctoral student Rodante van der Waal, and Veronica Mitchell from the University of Cape Town. Consisting of eleven chapters by an international roster of authors, Recommitting to Reproductive Justice: Care Ethical Perspectives ‘puts the question of sexual and social reproduction again front and centre in the field of care ethics’, arguing that ‘reproductive justice deserves to be in the spotlight of care ethics.’ The book is the first part of a two-volume project on Care Ethics, Birthing and Mothering. The second volume, which will focus on the critical interface between technology, mothering and care ethics, is co-edited by Priya Sharma, who was my guest in Episode 18 of the podcast, together with the prominent Indian care theorist Amrita Banerjee, who in addition to being Priya’s doctoral supervisor was also an academic mentor to Ira Chadha-Sridhar, my guest in Episode 15.

I should also mention two other books published in 2025 which, while not exactly in the mainstream of care ethics, in my opinion make a significant contribution to our understanding of caring relationships, particularly within families. Leah Libresco Sargeant’s The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto, which I compared and contrasted with Carol Gilligan’s recent In a Human Voice in this post, argues, in words with which feminist care ethicists would agree, that ‘to thrive, human beings need to exist in webs of mutual dependence, not in isolating, radical autonomy’. But in a challenge to some versions of care feminism, Sargeant maintains that ‘women’s equal dignity doesn’t require women to deny biological reality or attempt to be interchangeable with men’ and advocates building ‘a culture that accepts and celebrates women as they are rather than demanding that women keep their relationships and their bodies in check.’ Finally, The Unthinkable Sacrifice: An Essay on Fatherhood, by Zechariah Mickel, which was also published this year, and which I reviewed in this post, offers a refreshingly new perspective on men’s experience of caregiving, combining philosophical analysis with deeply personal reflection in a way which resonated with me both as a researcher on masculinity and care, and as a father.

I should add that this is a review of books published in English and that, as I noted in these posts, there’s a great deal of excellent writing about care that doesn’t receive international recognition because it’s written in other languages. Also, if there’s a book on care published in 2025 that I’ve missed, let me know in the comments, and I’ll review it in a future post.

…

As 2025 draws to a close, I look back on a year in which I’ve published nine new episodes of the Careful Thinking podcast, as well as two Substack interviews, featuring writers and thinkers on care from England, the Netherlands, Spain, India, and the United States. My thanks go to Priya Sharma, Mia Sosa-Provencio, Andries Baart, Guus Timmerman, Merel Visse, Melody Escobar, Lorraine Krall McCrary, Vince Mitchell, Alisha Ibkar, Erika Bachiochi, Irene Comins Mingol and Pragya Dev for their thoughtful responses to my questions, and for generously sharing insights into their important work.

The podcast continues to go from strength to strength, attracting more than 2000 unique listeners in 2025, from every continent, and achieving more than 3,500 downloads. Looking forward to 2026, I already have new episodes scheduled with guests from Spain, Italy, Slovakia, Canada and the United States, though I’m also open to suggestions, if there’s someone you think would be an interesting interviewee.

As for this Substack newsletter, I’m grateful for my 262 subscribers (up from 77 this time last year), and to the hundreds of others who read my posts but haven’t yet taken the significant – and free! – step of subscribing. So if that includes you, then why not start your New Year by signing up, to make sure you don’t miss hearing about new podcast episodes, as well as regular updates on new developments in the world of care theory.

Thank you to all my subscribers and followers for your support in 2025, and here’s to a care-ful 2026. Happy New Year!

…

The header image for this post is the painting ‘Polyphonie des livres’ by the contemporary French artist Sophie Dumont. I’m grateful to Sophie for permission to use the image.

One of the most significant developments in recent care theory has been the drive to amplify the voices of thinkers, scholars and practitioners from beyond the Global North. We’ve seen an increasing emphasis on promoting hitherto marginalised perspectives from the Global South, and on highlighting what the Mexicana/mestiza educator Mia Sosa-Provencio described, when I interviewed her for Episode 19 of the Careful Thinking podcast, as the ‘intergenerational knowing’ of indigenous communities, the kind of customs of care that researcher Alisha Ibkar (Episode 25) remembered from growing up in a ‘deeply collective’ village community in West Bengal, where, as Pragya Dev, another Indian researcher, suggested, ‘care wasn’t just expected, it was woven into daily life’.

As the American care theorist Maurice Hamington noted, in his conversation with me in Episode 6 of the podcast, it’s easy for those of us in Europe and North America to make the assumption that care ethics began in 1982 with the publication of Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (see this recent post). One of the strengths of Maurice’s own recent book Revolutionary Care: Commitment and Ethos, is the way it encourages readers to pay attention to the increasing geographical and cultural diversity of work in care theory. Another book published last year, the edited collection Decentering Epistemologies and Challenging Privilege: Critical Care Ethics Perspectives, also explores ‘how to decentre care ethics…via an encounter with non-Western philosophical traditions and alternative epistemologies’. And it’s good that next year’s annual conference of the international Care Ethics Research Consortium will take place in South Korea, making it the first one organised outside Europe or North America, and that contributors have been encouraged ‘to include learning from non-Eurocentric cultures’.

These are positive and overdue developments, and I like to think that this Substack newsletter, together with my Careful Thinking podcast, has made a modest contribution to the process, for example by featuring interviews with care theorists from the Indian subcontinent, like Alisha and Pragya, as well as Ira Chadha-Sridhar (Episode 15) and Priya Sharma (Episode 18). And as we look forward to 2026, I’m keen to feature more guests on the podcast from Asia, as well as Africa and Latin America (incidentally, for an excellent account of care theory in practice in Latin America, see this fascinating post by Mélina Magdelénat).

However, in the understandable rush to look to the Global South for new insights into care, it’s important that those of us in the Global North don’t ignore marginalised voices closer to home, and in particular European voices that tend to get overlooked in the mainstream conversation, for the simple reason that they aren’t speaking or writing in the dominant language of the global academic discourse, which is English.

Of course, there are some regions of Europe which are undeniably part of that international conversation about care, a prime example being the Netherlands, where influential theorists such as Frans Vosman and Annelies van Heijst were as much pioneers of care ethics as Carol Gilligan, Nell Noddings, Joan Tronto et al in North America. And of course the Netherlands, and particularly the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, continues to be one of the world’s most dynamic hubs of activity in care theory, a number of whose leading scholars, including Carlo Leget (Episode 8), Inge van Nistelrooij (Episode 17), Merel Visse (Episode 21) and Andries Baart (Episode 20), have been guests on the podcast.

In a recent post I reviewed a new French collection on the phenomenology of care, and France is certainly another significant locus of care theory, associated as it is with a group of feminist scholars that includes Sandra Laugier, Patricia Paperman, Pascale Molinier and Fabienne Brugère, all of whom are recognised as important voices in the global conversation about care. Their voices reached an even wider audience with the appearance in 2020 of the collection Care Ethics in Yet a Different Voice: Francophone Contributions, as part of the Peeters Ethics of Care series, which featured English translations of key writings by French and French Canadian care theorists. Standing at a slight tangent to this group, and its ‘unwavering commitment to showing that care is fundamentally political’ (to quote the blurb from that book), is the work of the Paris-based philosopher and dancer Christine Leroy, who was my guest in Episode 7 of the podcast, the English translation of whose book on the phenomenology of dance and the ethics of care I reviewed in this post, and who in my view is one of the most interesting newer voices in care ethics and care aesthetics (N.B. Mélina Magdelénat also recently published her own interview with Christine here).

In addition to the Netherlands and France, there are a number of other centres of activity in care theory, including in central and eastern Europe, exemplified in the Czech Republic by the work of Petr Urban, my guest in Episode 4 of the podcast, and in neighbouring Slovakia by scholars like Adriana Jensenková, who will be appearing on the podcast in the New Year.

However, beyond these relatively well-known examples of European scholarship, I would suggest that there’s a rich seam of research and writing on care, particularly in southern Europe, that doesn’t attract the same degree of attention, simply because it is mostly untranslated and therefore, to a greater or lesser extent, unseen and unheard beyond its own national boundaries (see this post for my reflections on the issues around translating ‘care’ between languages). In this post, I want to focus specifically on some of the important work going on in three countries - Italy, Spain and Portugal - partly because they are countries that I know reasonably well, but also because my own thinking has been particularly enriched by discovering work from each of these national contexts.

Of the three countries, developments in care theory in Italy are perhaps the best known at the international level, and the name of Luigina Mortari, arguably its leading care scholar, is certainly to the fore in discussions beyond her home country. Luigina directs the Melete Center of Philosophy for Care at the University of Verona, and she’s the author of many books, the best known being her Filosofia della cura (‘Philosophy of care’), which was published in 2015 and has been translated into a number of other languages. I heard Luigina speak at the inaugural conference of the international Care Ethics Research Consortium in Portland, Oregon, in 2018, and was impressed by the way her work connects contemporary care ethics with classical philosophy. Another important Italian voice in care ethics is the late Elena Pulcini, who taught at the University of Florence and was best known for her book La cura del mondo. Paura e responsabilità nell’età globale (‘Care of the world: fear, responsibility and justice in the global age’), and who sadly died in 2021, following complications from Covid.

    The late Ruth Groenhout (see Episode 5 of the podcast) speaking at the ‘Philosophy and 
    Politics of Care’ conference in Verona, 2024, alongside Luigina Mortari and colleagues 
                                                         (via univrmagazine.it)

In 2024 the Melete centre hosted an international conference on ‘Philosophy and politics of care’, which featured a number of speakers who have been guests on Careful Thinking, including Susi Ferrarello, the Italian-born philosopher and writer on empathy and the ethics of relationships, now based at California State University, who was my guest in Episode 14. As I noted in my recent post on the phenomenology of care, Susi is part of a network of predominantly Italian philosophers whose research applies phenomenological insights to issues in mental health and medicine.

However, if these Italian care scholars are relatively well known internationally, either because they write in English or because their work has been widely translated, there are certainly others, writing mainly in Italian, whose contribution has yet to be recognised elsewhere, but in my view deserves to be. My current research exploring the ideas of the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel as a resource for the ethics of care has brought me into contact with an international network of Marcel scholars, who in turn have introduced me to some lesser known European writers on care. For example, an Italian doctoral student working on Marcel recently recommended the work of the Rome-based philosopher Antonio Di Somma, and in particular his important new book Essere e speranza nella dimensione della cura. Valutazioni teoretico-pratiche a partire da M. Heidegger, K. Jaspers, G. Marcel (‘Being and hope in the dimension of care: theoretical and practical evaluations starting from M. Heidegger, K. Jaspers, G. Marcel’), which is one of the few texts I’ve come across that discusses Marcel in relation to care theory in any detail, and which incidentally also draws extensively on Luigina Mortari’s work. I’ve discovered that Antonio has also published journal articles on a wide range of topics in the ethics of care, and especially palliative care, which I’m looking forward to exploring.

Before moving on from Italy, I should also mention the work of Giacomo Lampredi, a young sociologist and research fellow at the University of Milan, who has written on political activism as care, and whose work provides an interesting parallel with Alisha Ibkar’s research on protest, performance and care, which she discussed with me in her recent appearance on the podcast. Giacomo is also scheduled to be a guest on the podcast in 2026.

                           L to R: Luigina Mortari, Elena Pulcini, Antonio Di Somma

Another of the speakers at last year’s Verona conference was the Spanish philosopher Agustín Domingo Moratalla, from the University of Valencia, which prompted me to look up his work online. As someone with an interest in personalist philosophy, I was intrigued by the fact that Agustín’s 2013 book El arte de cuidar: atender, dialoguer y responder (‘The art of caring: attention, dialogue and response’) and his 2022 publication, with its Latin title – Homo Curans (lit. ‘caring person’) – and Spanish subtitle - el coraje de cuidar (‘the courage to care’) - draw on some key thinkers in the tradition of ‘communitarian personalism’, including Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier, as well as on the ideas of Marcel and Ricoeur. Agustín, with whom I’ve had an exchange of emails, has a particular interest in the ethical implications of new technology, and in ethics as applied to the professions.

Regular readers of this newsletter will know that I’m also an admirer of the work of another (and very different) philosopher from Valencia. I interviewed Irene Comins Mingol, who is based a little further up the coast at the University of Jaume I in Castellón, for this post earlier in the year. I continue to be intrigued by Irene’s application of feminist care ethics to the field of peace studies, in works like her 2008 book La ética del cuidado y la construcción de la paz (‘The ethics of care and peacebuilding’) and Filosofía del cuidar: una propuesta coeducativa para la paz (‘Philosophy of care: a co-educational proposal for peace’) from 2009, as well as by her more recent work on caring masculinities and ecophilosophy.

Moving even further along the Spanish coast to Catalonia, I’ve come to realise that Barcelona is a particularly fertile hub of care scholarship. I’m grateful to Maurice Hamington for introducing me to Iris Parra Jounou, who describes herself as a nurse, philosopher and poet, and who was recently awarded a doctorate for her research exploring the intersections between bioethics, political theory and public health from a feminist perspective. Iris is an impressive younger scholar, who has already translated the writings of American care theorist Joan Tronto into Catalan, and is currently co-editing a volume on feminist public health ethics for the Peeters Ethics of Care series. I’m pleased to say that Iris has also agreed to be interviewed for the Careful Thinking podcast in the New Year.

          L to R: Agustín Domingo Moratalla, Irene Comins Mingol, Iris Parra Jounou

Staying in Barcelona, I’m grateful to Rafael Gómez, a recent Substack connection, for directing me towards other interesting work on care happening in that city. Rafael is a medical director and specialist in geriatric and palliative medicine at the University of Seville, though he actually recommended the writings of two Barcelona-based scholars. The philosopher and theologian Francesc Torralba is a prolific author whose many books, published in both Spanish and Catalan, have explored topics as diverse as bioethics, ecology and the philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard. Two of Torralba’s most recent books have been deeply personal reflections on the tragic death of his teenage son in a climbing accident, reminding me of other recent ‘grief memoirs’, for example by the Australian rock musician Nick Cave and the American screenwriter Colin Campbell, both of them fathers who lost children in tragic accidents, which I wrote about in the recent book on Men and Loss that I co-edited with my colleague Kerry Jones (and it’s interesting that the titles of Torralba’s books, which translate roughly as ‘There are no words’ and ‘The word that sustains me’, echo Campbell’s Finding the Words).

2023 saw the publication of La cura del món, des altres I d’un mateix (‘Caring for the world, others and ourselves’), which Torralba co-wrote with Javier de la Torre, and with Ester Busquets, another Catalan scholar whose work was recommended to me by Rafael. The question of the connection between care for self, the other, the community, and the planet, and whether one inevitably nurtures the other, is one that I’ve explored with a number of guests on the podcast, and that continues to intrigue me.

Like Iris Parra Jounou, Ester Busquets has a background in nursing. I was interested, as someone with a growing interest in the intersection of care ethics with literary studies (see this post), to learn that Busquets’ doctoral thesis, published in book form in 2023, explores the ethics of care through an extended discussion of Tolstoy’s novella, The Death of Ivan Ilylich. This was also one of the works discussed in Inge van Nistelrooij’s book on sacrifice and self-sacrifice in care, which I discussed with her when she was a guest on the podcast. Busquet’s book makes reference to some of the key names in Anglophone care ethics, such as Gilligan, Noddings and Tronto, but also includes discussion of the work of her fellow Spaniards, including Comins Mingol and Domingo Maratalla.

Finally, this brief survey of southern European care theory takes us westwards to Portugal, and to the ancient university of Coimbra, where I recently made contact with José Manuel Beato, another Marcel scholar. In addition to his work on Marcel, which is mostly in Portuguese, José has also contributed to two significant English-language collections on Philosophy of Care: New Approaches to Vulnerability and Therapy (2021) and The Ethics of Care: Theoretical and Practical Perspectives (2024), edited by his Coimbra colleague Joaquim Braga. These books, which emerged from the ‘Roads to Care’ colloquia organised at the university over the past few years, are a rich source of recent work on care, primarily in Portugal, Spain and Italy. While they demonstrate a familiarity with key debates in Anglophone care ethics, the contributors to these publications offer a refreshingly different, and distinctively southern European perspective, on those discussions.

                  L to R: Francesc Torralba, Ester Busquets, José Manuel Beato

Inevitably, this has been a brief and selective survey of some recent developments in care theory in these southern European countries. But I hope it gives an impression of the richness and variety of research on care that’s happening in that part of the world, which, because it’s published mainly in languages other than English, risks being overlooked in wider international discussions.

When I met up with the Australian care scholar Steven Steyl, during his recent visit to England (see my last post), the Careful Thinking podcast had just celebrated its second anniversary, and I’d just published the twenty-fifth episode. Steven thought it was a timely moment to ask me about my vision for the future of the podcast. I said I already had a number of guests lined up for 2026, and I was happy just to keep on doing more of the same kind of thing. But, on reflection, perhaps the podcast, and this Substack newsletter, are in need of a bolder vision. And maybe that’s something to do with bringing these unheard, or less heard voices, from Europe and elsewhere, to a wider audience. I hope to be doing some more of that in 2026. So watch this space…

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The header image for this post is the painting ‘Girl before a mirror’ (1938) by Pablo Piccaso, Museum of Modern Art, New York City.

My guest for the 26^th episode of the Careful Thinking podcast is the American legal scholar Erika Bachiochi, who joined me for a wide-ranging conversation about the history of feminism, men’s and women’s roles in care, the ways in which the law and public policy can support caregivers, and what a Catholic feminist perspective on care might look like.

Erika is a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and Professor of Practice and Director of the Mercy Otis Warren Initiative at the School of Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University, where she also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the online journal Fairer Disputations. A 2018 visiting scholar at Harvard Law School, Erika is a Senior Fellow at the Abigail Adams Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she founded the Wollstonecraft Project. She has published numerous articles in legal and political journals and in publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic.

Erika’s book The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision, which was published in 2021, offers a revisionist history of the early women’s rights movement, including a radical reassessment of the work of the pioneering eighteenth-century feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft.

                                                                Erika Bachiochi

I’ve been following Erika’s work closely for some time, and I’ve found her insights into the complexities surrounding the issues of gender, care and the family both stimulating and at the same time challenging to some of my own preconceived ideas. On a personal level, Erika’s work bringing feminist ideas into dialogue with Catholic Social Teaching has been a great help to me in my own journey. In the interests of full disclosure, I should also mention that Erika was kind enough to publish an article of mine in Fairer Disputations, and since then we’ve corresponded via email about questions concerning men and care. However, this interview was the first time we’d actually had the opportunity for a proper conversation, even if it was at a distance.

Erika isn’t the first of my podcast guests to cite Catholic Social Teaching as an influence on their thinking about care: previous guests who have done so include Xavier Symons (Episode 2), Melody Escobar (Episode 22), and most recently Lorraine Krall McCrary (Episode 23), with whom I had an extended discussion about the key principles of subsidiarity and solidarity as they affect the provision of care. And in their recent book on Relational Caring and Presence Theory in Healthcare and Social Work, which they discussed with me in Episode 20, Andries Baart and Guus Timmerman acknowledged that Andries’ theory of presence had its origins in his research with Catholic pastoral workers. Also, as I noted in a post last year about ‘Faith in care’, a number of other guests on the podcast, including Carlo Leget (Episode 8) and Inge van Nistelrooij (Episode 17) have cited Catholic thought as an early influence on their work on care, even if they have since become more critical in their attitudes to the Church.

There were a number of other parallels between this episode and previous episodes of the podcast. One of the feminist pioneers discussed in Erika’s book, and mentioned in my conversation with her, is the social reformer Jane Addams, whose work on poverty and public health I discussed with Lorraine McCall McCrary in Episode 23. Addams is also a central figure in Maurice Hamington’s groundbreaking 2002 book Embodied Care, which I discussed with him in Episode 6. And, in fact, an emphasis on the importance of embodiment is something else Erika shares with Maurice and other care theorists who have featured on the podcast: it’s perhaps no accident that two of her articles, which we discuss in this episode, have the titles ‘Embodied Equality’ and ‘Embodied Caregiving’.

Earlier podcast guests have also, like Erika, combined religious belief with a feminist perspective on care. In Episode 13 I explored what a Muslim feminist ethic of care might look like, in conversation with Sarah Munawar, and in the most recent episode of the podcast, Alisha Ibkar cited the influence on her thinking of a number of prominent Muslim feminist scholars. And in Episode 16, Elissa Strauss described the ways in which feminism and Judaism have together informed her thinking about care. My interview with Erika Bachiochi offers further evidence that a feminism informed by a deep spirituality and a faith-based belief in the equal dignity of women and men can make a distinctive contribution to current debates about care - and perhaps supply something that’s missing in secular feminist care ethics.

                   Mary Wollstonecraft                                           

My conversation with Erika on the podcast began by exploring her journey to becoming a legal scholar, which proved difficult to disentangle from her personal story of a tumultuous childhood, and her youthful exploration of a variety of lifestyles and philosophies, culminating eventually in a turn to Catholic faith, while at the same time holding on to her deep-seated feminist beliefs. We then discussed the rationale for Erika’s book The Rights of Women and its focus on Mary Wollstonecraft, before moving on to explore what the latter had to say about the balance between rights and moral duties, and about virtues, as well as her perhaps surprising ideas about gender, care and the family. This led on to a discussion of Erika’s revisionist account of early feminism, bringing the story up to date with a focus on the legal battles around abortion, and then introducing the work of Erika’s mentor Mary Ann Glendon, who sought to redress the balance between care, work and the family through law and public policy.

Turning to Erika’s critique of feminist care ethics, we talked about her nuanced assessment, in an article published in 2016, of the work of Eva Feder Kittay, tracing both the commonalities in their thinking, but also what Erika sees as Kittay’s failure to acknowledge the distinctive contribution of fathers, as well as her recourse to the state as the preferred provider. This offered a useful link to talking about Erika’s own proposals for government support for caregivers. In the final part of the episode, we discussed the similarities and differences, in their approaches to care, between Catholic feminism and liberal and radical feminism, ending with Erika’s plans for a sequel to The Rights of Women which will focus on contemporary debates around women, work and the family.

                 Mary Ann Glendon                                           Eva Feder Kittay

Here are some quotes by Erika from our conversation:

Older accounts of law...coming from Aristotle and Cicero and Christian thinkers who are really formative in my own thinking...point out that law...and politics really is about friendship ultimately and about pointing us in the direction of living well and living happily with one another. So, of course, law can’t get us there; clearly that would be awful if law wanted to get into every single aspect of our life and tell us how to live well. But law is always a tutor or...a nudge. And so we have to have an account of the kinds of human beings we are, whenever we’re thinking about law...And so I’m eager to go after older wisdom that has been really formative to me in my own thinking things through about how human beings can flourish, both personally, but then in families and in societies. That has a lot to do with cultivating of the human virtues, just the basic cardinal virtues of justice and courage and moderation and really practical wisdom, and then also of friendship, learning how to be friends together. And I think that really underlies a lot of my work in understanding care as well.

...

My college had this...whole month on religion. And I found myself...in a lecture on the Catholic Worker Movement and recovery from drug addiction. And I really went...with the intention of being, like, what do these Catholics know about recovery from drug addiction? And I had no idea what the Catholic Worker Movement is...founded by Dorothy Day, who’s kind of a progressive Catholic, had these houses of hospitality where she...took people in who are suffering, who are poor, who are disadvantaged, and really ministered to them. And so this man who spoke...his whole way of seeing the world was so attractive to me...it brought concern for the poor that I had deeply a concern for...the broken-hearted, the drug- addicted, with this edifying vision of care and concern for one another, a solidaristic way of seeing the world where we really go out to care for others...There was an answer here that was so new and that I just was so intrigued by...and so it just sent me on this massive journey that was many years long that was...spiritual, religious, moral and intellectual...The quick part is that I...fell in love with the Catholic Church, which is so weird because I was so anti-Catholic, because it was the most patriarchal institution on Earth. But then I went and studied theology for two years, and in the whole process, I would just say, I kept being surprised. And I’ve seen this happen with people today, in my own work, with just engaging other feminists (because I still call myself a feminist and still see the world in terms of interests and advocacy for women), that I think people are really surprised that Catholicism could have any answers, because maybe they haven’t been paying attention, I think, to the modern magisterium, the really beautiful articulation of the collaboration between men and women as having full human dignity.

...

I think it’s hard for us, as moderns who really do tend to think of rights today as tools for autonomous self-creation, and moral duties as something that are imposed by some theocratic government, or something like that. But really, I think most people have, if they’re really honest about it, a moral apparatus that undergirds their thought, undergirds their politics. I mean, we certainly see this on the progressive left in terms of a moral account about the community’s responsibility for the vulnerable, for not only vulnerable children, but for immigrants, for the environment. And so there is a robust moral account there that I think really has to do with our responsibilities to one another. And so we’re not free from obligations, we’re not free from moral imposition, every politics has some sort of moral undergirding...As human beings, we’re called to be virtuous and wise. And that’s what being a rational animal is. And [Wollstonecraft] wanted that not only for men, which she definitely wanted…But she also wanted that for women, to be really motivated by both the intellectual and moral excellences which really enable them to be free.

...

[Wollstonecraft] did regard the care of children in infancy to be one of the ‘grand duties’ annexed to the female character by nature…She sees the care of young children...first in the womb, but then also nursing, she saw breastfeeding as this great way that the child and the mother become so closely bound. But then she also saw it as a grand duty of fathers as well...She thinks women should enter the professions...but she really does see these familial relationships as being so core to who both men and women are, and that it really is the place where they become really happiest and most fulfilled. And I think we see that really corroborated in a lot of data today, in terms of what gives people meaning.

...

[Mary Ann Glendon] was...a distinguished professor of Harvard Law School, so did her own balancing of work and home, had her own three children. And so she really wants to...make work in politics and economics more humane and more centred, I would say, and more cognisant...of the really important caregiving work and work of nurturance that is at the heart of any type of regime. One way she puts it, I think is really helpful, is that in modern thinking we tend to have the individual, the market and the state, and those are the three actors. And we forget entirely about…the work of care in the family...but even some scholars who think about care a lot tend to want to talk about care infrastructure or care architecture. And they move directly from the need for care straight up into the political and economic realm or the market and the state and really maybe give short shrift to the family...She basically thought we had a caregiving crisis that couldn’t be solved by just putting all the children in daycare, that women and men tend to want to spend time with their children and they see it as their responsibility...And I think she was really prescient in that regard because, as we know in our time, we still hear a lot of negativity around marriage and motherhood and caregiving today.

...

I do want to just reiterate how much I love [Eva Feder] Kittay’s work, in particular that book [Love’s Labor]. And I do see us as both critics of liberalism and the idea of this kind of mythical, autonomous individual as being the lode star in our thinking about politics and economics...And I really just think that the way she articulates responsibilities for others is the exact right one, so that they arise out of need and vulnerability. And so she talks about that they arise out of a relationship. And so I just think talking about that we are each some mother’s child is a really beautiful way of putting that...And so what’s strange to me is this sort of asymmetry that I think happens in her account...She...doesn’t want to look to the traditional provider...who was for centuries the husband, but she wants to right away go to the modern state. And I think that…there’s this asymmetry, because she really lines up the mother as the caregiver as someone who has...a natural affinity and obligation to nurture and care...And so why wouldn’t we say the same of the father or...the one who is uniquely situated because he is biologically related to the child, to defer his own desires and even needs to meet the needs of the dependent caregiver and the child?...And so, why do we assume that there couldn’t be a trusting relationship between the two, that we just ... make an assumption that I don’t think is grounded in the way in which we see...so many fathers today, who are invested in caregiving for their own children...I just think that there’s a way in which we can elevate that paternal ethic of care. We can call more upon men to engage in an ethic of care in the family...And so I just think there has to be within care feminism some kind of account..[that] men can also be...really invested in the care of vulnerable people, most especially in their own families.

...

I do think there should be provision for families...I would want to see more cuts in other places so that we could really in justice give, especially those in need more material help. And that may be with housing, certainly with healthcare and education. But I do think we ought not have those who are caring for children be disadvantaged by the work that they’re doing in the economy. And I think that’s just, again, a way in which Mary Ann Glendon was so prescient and right about this, that we do still tend to see the economy and the way we think about economy and the tax system as kind of these mythical and usually male autonomous individuals who have no dependents, and that we really ought to be thinking a lot more about the family unit as a whole, and the needs that the family has, and the way in which the state can support that really important work of care.

...

I guess what I would say about what is distinctive about the Catholic feminist position would be...two things. One, and this would certainly be shared with the radical feminists, but not so much with liberal feminists, is the real importance of embodiment of the female body and the way in which the female body is more vulnerable in pregnancy, in breastfeeding. And I think the beauty of that, that it’s not just a vulnerability that is something that we should escape, but is a vulnerability that is transformative for so many women in the caregiving they do, that they just come to see the interdependence that they have with their own children and that gift, but then the interdependence in terms of...reliance on husbands. So I guess that would bring me back to the second point...just a real beautiful place for me is...part of the Catholic tradition, that there’s a way in which men are expected to take their roles and their contribution as fathers just as seriously as women take their roles and contributions as mothers, in terms of the care and formation and nurturance of children, that it’s really seen to be like the most basic vocation...So the idea of maternity and paternity is so baked into the family that is the Church...that kind of collaboration and integration of care is just so basic, like the relations of care between man and woman, the relations of self-gift and self -giving care is just so basic to the Catholic understanding.

You can listen to the whole episode here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can download a transcript of the episode here:

Careful Thinking Episode 26 Transcript Final

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In other news...

Recently I had the privilege of meeting two of my former podcast guests – Steven Steyl (Episode 10), who was visiting England from Australia, and Ira Chadha-Sridhar (Episode 15) – in person for the first time. Ira kindly hosted us at Hughes Hall in Cambridge for a fascinating conversation about the current state of care ethics, and much more besides. I’m also grateful to Ira for recently giving a presentation on her research to our new Open University Care Ethics Interest Group (which I mentioned in this post). Finally, congratulations are due to Ira on being awarded a publishing contract with Oxford University Press for her forthcoming book on Care and the Mandate of Medical Law.

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The header image for this post is the painting ‘Hidden Life in Nazareth’ by the contemporary Ukrainian icon painter and muralist Ivanka Demchuk. It was used as the cover image for Zechariah Mickel’s recent book The Unthinkable Sacrifice: An Essay on Fatherhood, which I reviewed in this post.

In a recent post, I discussed Carol Gilligan’s influential book, In a Different Voice, which is widely (though not unanimously) regarded as the foundational text of care ethics. Since those early days in the 1980s, the field of care ethics has grown exponentially, and along the way has been shaped by a variety of intellectual currents. Feminism has been obviously been a major and arguably dominant influence, but other philosophical traditions have also played a part in moulding this exciting and increasingly diverse field of enquiry.

While a number of care ethicists have been influenced by Anglo-American analytic philosophy - names that spring to mind include Stephanie Collins, author of the 2015 book The Core of Care Ethics, as well as a few of the guests on my Careful Thinking podcast, including Xavier Symons (Episode 2), Steven Steyl (Episode 10), and Ira Chadha-Sridhar (Episode 15) - by far the most important philosophical influence on contemporary care theory has been what is broadly termed ‘continental’ philosophy, and in particular phenomenology. Pinning down what exactly is meant by ‘phenomenology’ is no easy matter (almost as difficult as finding an agreed definition of care ethics), but in simple terms, according to Robert Sokolowski, author of one of the most accessible introductions to the subject, it can be described as ‘the study of human experience and of the ways things present themselves to us in and through such experience’ (besides Sokolowski’s book, I’d also recommend Dan Zahavi’s Phenomenology: the Basics to anyone looking for a brief overview).

The early twentieth-century Austrian-German philosopher Edmund Husserl is regarded as the founder of phenomenology, while other key figures in the movement in Germany include his student and assistant Edith Stein, and pre-eminently, Martin Heidegger. In France, phenomenology was taken up by mid-twentieth-century thinkers like Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Paul Ricoeur. A striking number of important phenomenologists have also been religious believers: not only Stein, who became a Carmelite nun, but also Dietrich von Hildebrand, and in Poland Karol Wojtyla, better known as Pope John Paul II. And in a recent post, I mentioned the so-called ‘theological turn’ in recent French phenomenology, associated with philosophers such as Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Louis Chrétien.

                 Top L to R: Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, Martin Heidegger; Bottom L to R: 
                 Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur

When I began to be seriously interested in philosophy a few years ago (coming to it without any formal training in the subject, having originally studied English literature and much later social psychology at university), I was immediately attracted to phenomenology. Its realism - the assumption, in Sokolowski’s words, that ‘the mind and the world are correlated with one another’ and that ‘things do appear to us, things truly are disclosed’ - offered a welcome alternative to the relativism of the social constructionist and poststructuralist ideas that had shaped my academic work up to that point, and with which I had become increasingly dissatisfied.

In the past few years, I’ve noticed that phenomenological methods have also become increasingly popular with other academic researchers, especially in applied fields such as healthcare and social work. A decade or so ago every PhD student seemed to want to use discourse analysis in their research, whereas now phenomenology – particularly in the form of Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) - is very much in fashion. In fact, two of my Open University colleagues, Sarah Vicary and Gillian Ferguson, have been pioneers in applying IPA to social work, through their co-authored book Social Work Using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, which was published last year, and also via their new Social Work and IPA Research Network.

Although the relationship between phenomenology and care ethics is, to quote the title of a 2020 volume on the subject in the Peeters Ethics of Care series, a ‘contested kinship’, it has undoubtedly been important for many of the care theorists now working, including some of those who have been guests on my Careful Thinking podcast. The Czech philosopher Petr Urban, my guest in Episode 4 of the podcast, told me that he set out on his academic career ‘as someone interested in continental philosophy, and my PhD research was focused on the founder of phenomenological philosophy, Edmund Husserl’. Petr’s first book, which was based on his doctoral research, explored the philosophy of language in Husserl’s early work, though he went on to develop a particular interest in the phenomenology of intersubjectivity. This led to a focus on Edith Stein’s philosophical writings, which Petr has discussed in a number of journal articles, highlighting the value of Stein’s ‘detailed phenomenological analysis of empathy’, which demonstrates that ‘the...phenomenological tradition with its analyses of intersubjectivity and sociality is still quite relevant and offers...nuanced insights into how we are related to each other and...the different aspects of sociality and social life.’

Edith Stein’s work on empathy has also been important for the French philosopher and dancer Christine Leroy, who was my guest in Episode 7 of the podcast, and whose book Kinaesthetic Empathy, Ethics and Care: a Phenomenology of Dance, I reviewed in a recent post. However, the principal phenomenological influence on Christine’s work has clearly been Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and she told me that her discovery of his work was decisive in her intellectual formation: ‘Actually, I didn’t know much about phenomenology before reading him. But all I knew, all I studied...made sense when I read his book Eye and Mind...So it was on the basis of this reading that I opened the door to phenomenology and through the prism of this decisive reading experience that I considered the concept of intentionality, which is central to phenomenology.’ In fact, one of Christine’s early publications was the short book La Phénoménologie, which she described as ‘a history of the genesis of the concept of intentionality in phenomenology.’

Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body has also influenced the work of the American care theorist Maurice Hamington, who featured in Episode 6 of the podcast, and in particular his 2004 book on Embodied Care. Maurice talked in the episode about the ‘little phenomenological analysis’ of washing his young daughter’s hair that he published in 2002, ‘and how that communicated care through touch and through comportment, rather than explicit language’, for which, he said, ‘Merleau-Ponty gave the phenomenological, theoretical understanding of the body’,

The work of Susi Ferrarello, who was my guest in Episode 14 of the podcast, is also informed by the phenomenological tradition. Susi has published extensively on Husserl and has edited books on phenomenological bioethics and the phenomenology of mindfulness. Her own writing includes studies of the phenomenology of sex, love and intimacy, and most recently the phenomenology of pregnancy and early motherhood (see these posts). Susi is also associated with PhenoLab, a theoretical laboratory in phenomenology and mental health, led by Francesca Brencio, the aim of which is ‘to promote and improve the interdisciplinary dialogue between phenomenology and mental health sciences, nourishing the vision of a broader dialogue between philosophy and medicine’.

               From L to R: Petr Urban, Christine Leroy, Maurice Hamington, Susi Ferrarello

Other podcast guests have cited individual phenomenologists as influences on their work. Nigel Rapport, who was my guest in Episode 3 (and who recently published a book on Levinas and anthropology), the late Ruth Groenhout (Episode 5) and Andries Baart (Episode 20) all cited Emmanuel Levinas’ work as being important for them. Carlo Leget (Episode 8) and Inge van Nistelrooij (Episode 17), two of the leading care ethicists in the Netherlands, both highlighted the significance for their thinking of Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic or interpretive phenomenology. Inge’s work also owes a debt to more recent French phenomenologists like Jean-Luc Marion and Emmanuel Housset.

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These reflections on phenomenology and care were prompted by the appearance of a new French-language book, Phénoménologie du Soin (Phenomenology of Care), which was published last month by Hermann of Paris. The book is edited by Tudi Gozé, Jerome Englebert, Florent Amadei, and Hubert Wykretowicz, all of whom are French or Belgian researchers with interests in psychiatry or psychotherapy.

The book’s introduction explains that it ‘explores the act of caring and the experience of being cared for, not as a therapeutic technique, but primarily as a complex, embodied, relational, and situated human experience’ (all translations from the book are my own). The editors continue: ‘Faced with the contemporary crisis of care - its uncertain purposes, its institutional paradoxes, its political stakes - this book proposes a radically renewed approach, based on phenomenology.’ The book consists of thirteen chapters, exploring topics such as the relationship between phenomenology and psychiatry; a phenomenological approach to art therapy; and a phenomenological perspective on autism. There’s also an intriguing Japanese contribution featuring a phenomenological analysis of the experiences of young carers.

                                                           Florence Caeymaex

However, the chapter that interested me the most, and which comes closest to the concerns that I’ve explored on the podcast and in this newsletter, is one by Florence Caeymaex, a professor at the University of Liège, with the title ‘Ce qui soigner veut dire?’ (What does caring mean, or what does it mean to care?), and subtitled ‘perspective du care et phénoménologie du soin’ . I was immediately drawn to this chapter, partly because its use of the English word ‘care’ reminded me of my discussion, in an earlier post, of the difficulties of finding an equivalent in other languages for this word, and also because it includes an extensive discussion of Anglophone care ethicists like Carol Gilligan and Joan Tronto - and lastly because it highlights with great clarity some of the commonalities between phenomenology and care ethics.

Caeymaex writes that, in the chapter, ‘I seek to show what a phenomenology of care becomes when it is placed, or rather undertaken, from the perspective of care—that is, from the perspective developed by feminist care studies.’ She suggest that care ethics ‘mobilises a phenomenological approach in two ways: by drawing on the lived experience of care in the first person, on the one hand, and by activating a critical reflexivity regarding appearance, on the other’ and involving ‘reinvestment in the situated and embodied experience we have of the world.’

Having begun with Gilligan and Tronto, Caeymaex devotes a good deal of the chapter to the work of the leading French care ethicist Pascale Molinier, whose name is often cited alongside those of Sandra Laugier (see this post) and Patricia Paperman, with whom she published Qu’est-ce que le care ? Souci des autres, sensibilité, responsabilité (notice that deliberate use of the English word again) in 2009, and whose most recent book, exploring the ethical dimension of care work, is based on her research in a Paris nursing home. As it happens, Molinier is the next scheduled speaker (on 11th December) in the Care and Democracy seminar series (see these posts) organised by the Center for Critical Democracy Studies at the American University of Paris.

The diverse chapters that make up Phénoménologie du Soin, and especially Florence Caeymaex’s contribution, serve as a reminder of the unique insights that a phenomenological approach can offer into the experience of caring and being cared for. Caeymaex is surely right to argue that phenomenology and care ethics have much in common, sharing what she describes as ‘a certain oblique and reflexive way of approaching their object—care.’

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As a footnote, I should mention that there is one more episode of the Careful Thinking podcast to come in 2025 (watch this space for further details), and that, all being well, the first episode in 2026 will feature my conversation with Zechariah Mickel, author of the recent book The Unthinkable Sacrifice: an Essay on Fatherhood, which I reviewed in this post, and which draws on the work of the thinkers associated with the ‘theological turn’ in French phenomenology that I mentioned above.

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The header image for this post is the painting ‘The Sick Child’ by Edvard Munch (1907), Tate, London.