Critical Ethics of Care in Social Work

Transforming the Politics and Practices of Caring

Bob Pease, Anthea Vreugdenhil, Sonya Stanford, Bob Pease, Anthea Vreugdenhil, Sonya Stanford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367152161
• eBook ISBN: 9781315399164
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

This book argues that the concept of care is a political and a moral concept. As such, it enables us to examine moral and political life through a radically different lens. The editors and contributors to the book argue that care has the potential to interrogate relationships of power and to be a tool for radical political analysis for an emerging critical social work that is concerned with human rights and social justice.

The book brings a critical ethics of care into the realm of theory and practice in social work. Informed by critical theory, feminism, intersectionality and post-colonialism, the book interrogates the concept of care in a wide range of social work settings. It examines care in the context of social neglect, interdisciplinary perspectives, the responsibilisation agenda in social work and the ongoing debate about care and justice. It situates care in the settings of mental health, homelessness, elder care, child protection, asylum seekers and humanitarian aid. It further demonstrates what can be learnt about care from the post-colonial margins, Aboriginal societies, LGBTI communities and disability politics. It demonstrates ways of transforming the politics and practices of care through the work of feminist mothers, caring practices by men, meditations on love, rethinking self-care, extending care to the natural environment and the principles informing cross-species care.

The book will be invaluable to social workers, human service practitioners and managers who are involved in the practice of delivering care, and it will assist them to challenge the punitive and hurtful strategies of neoliberal rationalisation. The critical theoretical focus of the book has significance beyond social work, including nursing, psychology, medicine, allied health and criminal justice.

Part I
Framing care

1
Towards a critical ethics of care in social work

Bob Pease, Anthea Vreugdenhil and Sonya Stanford

Introduction

It is widely recognised that everyone at some stage in their lives will require care, whether it be in infancy or old age, at the end of life or due to illness or impairment. In these circumstances, to be cared for is a fundamental requirement for our development as human beings (Lynch, Baker and Lyons, 2009). Beyond this life course perspective, care is also required as a result of political conflicts, natural disasters, refugee and asylum seeker movements across the world, terrorism and environmental destruction resulting from climate change.

In recent years, the concept of care has been the subject of research and scholarship in the diverse fields of sociology, social policy, psychology, health studies, politics, epidemiology, philosophy, economics and epidemiology (Phillips, 2007; Lynch et al., 2009; Armstrong and Braedley, 2013; Tronto, 2013; Gonzalez and Iffland, 2014a; Barnes, Brannelly, Ward and Ward, 2015a; Engster and Hamington, 2015a; Robinson, 2015). Issues of care have arisen as a particular concern in critical social policy studies. In this field, how the institutional logic of neoliberalism is invoked to justify the ‘contractual care’ of citizens (Culpitt, 1999; McDonald, 2006; Ferguson, 2008) is critically examined against humanitarian values of care that are central to critical social science (Wilkinson and Kleinman, 2016) and ‘care professions’ such as social work (Bauman, 2000). Most often this analysis reveals a clash in ethics that are associated with what it means to provide and receive care. This book illustrates where these clashes occur as they relate to human and non-human care and caring.

The idea for this book grew from conversations among social work academics at the University of Tasmania, Australia, sparked by the appointment of one of the editors, Bob Pease, as the new Professor of Social Work. We were searching for a collective writing project that would further our research interests and also enable us to challenge, albeit in small way, the growing emphasis on individualised research metrics within our university. Across a wide range of research and practice topics, a common theme which threaded through many of those conversations was care and its place and meaning in contemporary social work. While for some care was explicit in their research agendas, for others it was more implicit. From that core group, we reached out to social work academics and practitioners around Australia and beyond. We invited colleagues to join with us to reinstate care into the vocabulary of social work: not care as we had come to know it through neo-liberal discourse, but a critical, political version of care. Without exception, our approaches were met with enthusiasm and excitement. This was not, however, to be a naïve endeavour and the ‘dark’ history of care in social work was not lost on any of us.

All contributors to this volume take a critical theory informed approach to care within the disciplinary frame of social work. The majority of the chapter authors are located in Australia, although the experiences of a number of contributors extend beyond their current Australian location. The Australian context, like other Western countries, is in the grip of neoliberalism where the costs of care are shifted from government and public institutions to the private sphere of the home. As in all Western cultures, liberal individualism underpins governmental approaches to care in Australia. The notion of the free-willed autonomous individual embedded in these approaches to care stands in contrast to the relational and interdependent conception of human beings that informs this book (Lawson, 2007; Moschella, 2014; Barnes et al., 2015a; Gouws and van Zly, 2015).

In the book we argue that care is a political and a moral concept (Williams, 2001). As such, it enables us to examine moral and political life from a radically different lens compared to the conservative moral and political ethos of neoliberalism. Tronto (1995a) argues that care has the potential to interrogate relationships of power to reveal how current institutional arrangements support inequality and injustice. Caring is politically progressive because it encourages us to move beyond the pursuit of self-interest to embrace the importance of caring for other people as a critical ethic for a more socially just world (Tronto, 1995b). It fosters a relational notion of interests that is bound up with caring relationships with others in local and global contexts from both the perspective of when we do care and when we experience care. A critical ethics of care is thus premised upon a relational ontology where trust, mutuality and connectedness challenge the autonomous individualism of neoliberal policies (Lawson, 2007; Zembylas, 2010; Daly, 2013; Barnes et al., 2015a). Thus relationality and interdependence between people and what sustains us (such as the environment) are key underpinnings of the critical ethics of care advocated in this book.

Bringing critical care ethics into social work

Care is a value and it is a practice that can involve work and professional standards (Held, 2004). Being cared for implies the need for others to care in pragmatic terms, in moral terms and in political terms, in both intimate relations in the private sphere and professionally in the public sphere. In the latter context, social work is framed as a caring profession (Lloyd, 2006). Caring provides the basis for many of the interventions that guide social work practice. However, in spite of this, the potential of a critical ethics of care to redress inequality in political and practical terms is largely neglected in social work. We argue in this book that a critical ethics of care should be at the heart of social work (Parton, 2003).

A critical ethics of care is also important in the development of critical social work. However, with few exceptions (Banks, 2014; Barnes, Brannelly, Ward and Ward, 2015b; Bozalek, 2016), critical social work writers have not engaged with the wider political debates about care ethics. Banks (2014) has noted that notwithstanding the ethical themes embedded in social justice–based politics, radical and critical social work have not emphasised ethics as part of their practice. Furthermore, radical social work has been more concerned with justice than care. This may reflect a masculinist bias in the development of progressive social work, mirroring the historical and contemporary gender split between justice and care, where justice is seen to be more characteristic of men’s ways of thinking, while women’s focus is said to be more oriented to care (Held, 1995). This book aims to address this gap and makes the case that a critical ethics of care provides a new politics for critical social work theory and practice in the context of neoliberalism, risk discourses, evidence-based practice and growing social and political inequalities.

The book aims to bring a critical ethics of care into the realm of theory and practice in social work. Just as Held (2004) asks why she should give priority to justice over caring for others, we ask why critical social work should ignore the ethic of care in developing socially transformative practices in social work in relation to other people and other species. We do not regard care and justice as dichotomous, and the critical concept of care we advocate in this book includes justice. We take the view advocated by Robinson (2015), Tronto (1995a), Held (2004) and others that the development of a critical ethics of care can promote social justice. As such, we argue that it is important for the practice of critical social work and we demonstrate through the contributors’ chapters what a socially just approach to care and caring will involve.

Banks (2014) has drawn attention to the dangers as well as the possibilities of critical social work embracing care ethics. Such an engagement must move beyond the regulation of the conduct of social workers and service users to embrace the wider politics of solidarity with those who are marginalised by neoliberalism. This means that a critical ethics of care needs to operate as a moral philosophy to guide practice and to be implemented in caring practices in dayto-day work. We acknowledge this is not an easy task amid the harsh mentality of neoliberal welfare. Research consistently indicates that neoliberalism causes suffering for socially vulnerable people, as well as for practitioners whose task it is to implement neoliberal technologies of screening, monitoring and controlling (see, for example, Frost and Hoggett, 2008; Smith et al., 2016).

Gendering care in social work: moving beyond essentialism

Care often occurs in face-to-face relationships between people (Daly, 2013; Barnes et al., 2015a). In the neoliberal policy context, care is arranged to occur in the private sphere of the family and is predominantly reliant upon the unpaid work of women (Lawson, 2007; Daly, 2013) who are ‘locked out’ of secure paid work (Williams, 2001). In this book, we advocate the relocation of care from an individual and privatised practice to that of collective and communal responsibility. Our task is also to argue the value of care wherever it occurs – in both personal and professional contexts.

We acknowledge the debt to feminism and argue that in a socially just ethic of care, care work needs to be distributed equally between men and women. We argue against the view that women are natural carers. In embracing a feminist political ethic of care, we distance ourselves from early essentialist framings of care (Chodorow, 1978; Gilligan, 1982) as reflecting biological differences in women’s and men’s moral reasoning. Accordingly, the critical care ethics advocated by contributors to this book challenge the essentialist association of women and caring that reinforce traditional gender stereotypes about women and men (Ward, 2015). At the same time, we recognise that women spend far more time than men doing care work and that women often feel morally compelled to undertake care-related tasks. This reflects men’s power and privilege and their ability to avoid caregiving responsibilities (Hanlon, 2009) through political strategies that perpetuate gender inequality, such as workforce participation rates.

We are mindful of the dangers of a focus on care reinforcing the private-public split, where women are relegated to the private realm of the home while men continue to dominate the public sphere (Held, 2004). However, this is a concern when care is framed within a narrow ethic only pertaining to women and decontextualised from other cultural contexts. While care ethics is historically grounded in women’s experiences of care, critical care ethics generally, and feminist care ethics specifically, also acknowledge the importance of men being engaged in care (Engster and Hamington, 2015b). We argue against the premise that women are naturally more compassionate and caring than men. However, we do recognise that women’s socialisation and grounded experiences of caring will mean that women are more likely than men to be predisposed towards caring (Porter, 2006). One of the challenges in developing a critical ethics of care is how to encourage men to care more (Kershaw, 2010). From a critical ethics of care perspective, this means a radical change to existing power relations that are embedded in institutional arrangements. It also means a change in everyday relations and practices of power that are a feature of the more intimate domains of our lives.

Feminist and critical theories of care shift the focus from individualist framings of care to wider collectivist and global approaches. As Lynch et al. (2009) illustrate, the affective system of care is located alongside the economic, political and socio-cultural systems as one of the mechanisms in which equality and inequality are produced. As such, it must become one of the domains in which critical social work is promoted.

The intersectionality of care in social work: addressing privilege and power

Care ethics has been criticised for its lack of intersectional perspective (Hankivsky, 2014; Ward, 2015). Given the unequal gendered division of labour in relation to care, it is understandable that gender will have a primary status in relation to care ethics. However, it is important to remember that class, race, nation and sexuality also constitute important dimensions of care work. Care work is unequally distributed along the axes of gender, class, race and caste (Hankivsky, 2014). As Tronto (2010) has noted, care takes place in the context of non-responsiveness and irresponsibility of members of privileged groups. Consequently, in this book, we promote an intersectional analysis of care in social work that considers race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, disability and age, along with gender.

Conceptualisations of care have also been criticised because of their connections to the global north and Western power structures (Hankivsky, 2014). As editors, we are conscious of the colonial context in which our discussion of critical care ethics takes place. Most of our contributors are white and are located in privileged positions within a colonial society. As such, we need to remind ourselves that the form of critical care ethics advocated here needs to be recognised as partial and not universal. We need to be sensitive to how care is enacted in Indigenous societies and how they may contribute to critical and political ethics of care (Weaver, 2016; Boulton and Brannelly, 2015). As an indelibly white profession, social work needs to incorporate the critique of how efforts to care have caused such damage to Aboriginal people. A critical ethics of care therefore requires new ways for hearing the pain of the profession’s efforts to care and to learn the potential to care in critically informed ways.

There has been significant criticism of the ethics of care in terms of oppressing those who are marginalised. Some critical disability activists, for example, reject the concept of care because in their view it involves a representation of disabled people as a burden. They associate care with dependency, paternalism and disempowerment (Wood, 1991; Shakespeare, 2006). We are very conscious of the dangers of paternalistic and colonialist forms of care (Narayan, 1995), where those on the receiving end of care are framed as vulnerable and weak. Such care discourses promote what Grey (2008) calls ‘benevolent othering’. In such instances, care can become a form of control and domination by privileged and powerful actors. This critique alerts us to the importance of interrogating the power relations involved in care. It also reminds us that relations of care are rarely so linear: we can be both a carer and in need of care ourselves in intimate relationships and in wider social and political relationships.

Caring beyond local contexts and national borders

Another criticism of care ethics is that it is only relevant in local and familial contexts (Lawson, 2007). What doe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• PART I Framing care
• PART II Situating care
• PART III Unsettling care
• PART IV Transforming care
• Afterword
• Index