Decentering Epistemologies and Challenging Privilege

Critical Care Ethics Perspectives

Edited by Sophie Bourgault, Maggie FitzGerald, and Fiona Robinson

SERIES: Carework in a Changing World

Rutgers University Press

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.

‘Decentering Epistemologies and Challenging Privilege is destined to be the gold standard in care epistemology. The book delivers on its promise to ‘decenter’ epistemology by engaging positions of non-white, non-male, and non-Western thinkers. The insights are fresh and advance feminist epistemological scholarship.’ Maurice Hamington, author of Revolutionary Care: Commitment and Ethos

SOPHIE BOURGAULT is an associate professor of political theory at the University of Ottawa, Canada. She is the coeditor of four edited volumes on care and was a guest coeditor for a special issue on gender, work, and justice (Politique et Sociétés, 2016) and for The International Journal of Care and Caring (2020; with F. Robinson).

MAGGIE FITZGERALD is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. She is the author of Care and the Pluriverse: Rethinking Global Ethics.

FIONA ROBINSON is a professor of political science at Carleton University, Canada. She is the author of Globalizing Care: Ethics, Feminist Theory, and International Relations, The Ethics of Care: A Feminist Approach to Human Security, and the coeditor, with Rianne Mahon, of Feminist Ethics and Social Politics: Towards a New Global Political Economy of Care.

Introduction by Sophie Bourgault, Maggie FitzGerald, and Fiona Robinson
1     Indigenous Voices and Relationships: Insights from Care Ethics and Accounts of Hermeneutical Injustice, by Christine Koggel
2     Epistemic Injustice, Face-to-Face Encounters and Caring Institutions, by Sophie Bourgault
3     Privilege and the Denial of Vulnerability: When Care Ethics Meets Epistemologies of Ignorance, by Marie Garrau
4     Learning through Care: Decentering an Epistemology of Domination to Theorize Caring Men at the “Center,” by Riikka Prattes
5     Decenterings Elsewhere and the Epistemic Dimensions of Care, by Vrinda Dalmiya
6     The Commitment to Care: An Unwavering Epistemic Decentering, by Maggie FitzGerald
7     Indigenous and Feminist Ecological Reflections on Feminist Care Ethics: Encounters of Care, Absence, Punctures, and Offerings, by Andrea Doucet, Eva Jewell and Vanessa Watts
8     Crafting a New Corpo-Reality in Care Ethics: Contributions from Feminist New Materialisms and Posthumanist Ethics, by Émilie Dionne
9     Diffracting Care and Posthuman Ethics: Responsibility, Response-ability and Privileged Irresponsibility, by Vivienne Bozalek
10     “Do You Really Want to Know about This?”: Critical Feminist Ethics of Care as a Project of Unsettling, by Masaya Llavaneras Blanco
11     The Operation(s) of Abolitionist Care: Healing, Care Ethics, and the Movement for Black Lives, by Christopher Paul Harris
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, by Alistair Niemeijer and Merel Visse
Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors
Index

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