Decentering Epistemologies and Challenging Privilege

Critical Care Ethics Perspectives

Sophie Bourgault, Maggie FitzGerald, Fiona Robinson

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781978835023, 9781978835030
• eBook ISBN: 9781978835047
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethics in Medicine
• Index: Social Sciences

Care ethics first emerged as an attempt to decenter ethics; feminist scholars like Carol Gilligan argued that women's moral experiences were not reflected in the dominant, masculinist approaches to ethics, which were centered on a rational, disembodied, atomistic moral subject. Care ethics challenged this model by positing ethics as relational, contextualized, embodied, and realized through practices rather than principles. Over the past decades, many care ethics scholars have sought to further this project by considering care politically and epistemologically, in relation to various intersecting hierarchies of power and knowledge.

This book advances this project by discussing the ways care ethics contributes to the decentering of dominant epistemologies and to the challenging of privilege and by considering how to decenter care ethics itself via an encounter with non-Western philosophical traditions and alternative epistemologies. Written by scholars from different countries, disciplines, and intellectual traditions, the volume offers original care ethics contributions on epistemic injustice, privileged irresponsibility, ecofeminism, settler colonialism, social movements such as BLM, and various racialized and gendered inequities tied to care work.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Indigenous Voices and Relationships: Insights from Care Ethics and Accounts of Hermeneutical Injustice
• 2. Epistemic Injustice, Face-to-Face Encounters, and Caring Institutions
• 3. Privilege and the Denial of Vulnerability: When Care Ethics Meets Epistemologies of Ignorance
• 4. Learning through Care: Decentering an Epistemology of Domination to Theorize Caring Men at the “Center”
• 5. Decenterings Elsewhere and the Epistemic Dimensions of Care
• 6. The Commitment to Care: An Unwavering Epistemic Decentering
• 7. Indigenous and Feminist Ecological Reflections on Feminist Care Ethics: Encounters of Care, Absence, Punctures, and Offerings
• 8. Crafting a New Corpo-Reality in Care Ethics: Contributions from Feminist New Materialisms and Posthumanist Ethics
• 9. Diffracting Care and Posthuman Ethics: Responsibility, Response-ability, and Privileged Irresponsibility
• 10. “Do You Really Want to Know about This?”: Critical Feminist Ethics of Care as a Project of Unsettling
• 11. The Operation(s) of Abolitionist Care: Healing, Care Ethics, and the Movement for Black Lives
• 12. When Facts Only Go So Far: Decentering What It Means to Know and Understand as a Care-Ethical Researcher in a Polarized, Post-Truth Era
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Index