Decentering Epistemologies and Challenging Privilege: Critical Care Ethics Perspectives

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.

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.