Welcome to Unit 2: Exploring Care & its different Flavours

As explained in the above Unit 2 welcome video, Unit 2 is designed to support members of this learning community, as they cultivate their ability to practice care-full scholarship, by providing an introduction to Feminist Care Ethics (FCE) theory.

The sheer volume and richness of FCE literature means that the reach of this Unit is limited to offering an introductory overview, the primary purpose of which is to serve as a foundation for the analytical framework of Care-Full Scholarship which we offer at the beginning of Unit 3. In our resource library you will find an extended list of suggestions for further reading. Importantly though, as noted in Unit 1, there is no need to be an expert in FCE in order to be able to work with and draw benefit from the concept of Care-Full Scholarship. Thus, the suggested further reading is offered as an optional extra for those with the desire (as well as time and energy) to dive in deeper.

In addition to supporting your familiarisation with FCE, we also take the opportunity to briefly introduce a few of the other key concepts and associated bodies of scholarship. Namely:

• Situated Knowledges, Plurality & Positionality
• Power & Justice
• More-than-human worlds

They are each worthy of mention in their own right for the fact that they so fundamentally inform our understanding of care theory and in turn (as we move on to discuss more directly from Unit 3), how to nurture and align one’s practice and ways of being with a culture of care-full scholarship.

Despite our coverage of FCE literature being intentionally light, as this Unit is still nevertheless quite rich in content, it is up to you to choose to follow all the lessons, or to only pick 1 or 2 that feel of particular interest and delve deeper into those. But, even if you do decide to be selective, please do still try out the interactive components of this Unit to develop your understanding further through discussion with other learners on this course.

If you’d like to make notes, we’ve provided downloadable unit-themed blank pages, compatible with MS Word, which you are welcome to use.