Caring with - Power & Justice

In this lesson we take the opportunity to highlight the fundamental importance of issues of power and justice to the conceptualisation and practicing of care ethics. As Tronto (2013: 33) notes: “since all relationships of care inevitably involve power, and often involve deep power differentials, all care relations are, in an important way, political”.

Whilst issues of power and justice surface in many places across this MOOC, here we take this opportunity to particularly emphasise the significance of:

• Power and marginalised communities. “It is important to think about who is benefiting from the stories we tell, the systems we design and if the benefits are shared and negotiated as much as possible” (Rogowska-Stangret 2021: 21)
• Researching sensitive issues, like power and justice, in non-democratic institutional environments;  
• Power and justice from a feminist political ecology perspective, dealing critically with the barriers to just sustainability transformation;
• Cognitive justice, namely a “critique on the dominant paradigm of modern science that promotes the recognition of alternative paradigms or alternative sciences by facilitating and enabling dialogue between, often incommensurable, knowledges”. On this topic, see also a recent article about knowledge-related concepts in sustainability science;
• The relationship between power, justice and positionality.

In the remainder of this lesson, as a prompt to further exploring the centrality of issues of power and justice to care ethics, we invite you to watch a two short videos by inspiring scholars Chiara Tornaghi and Lucy Aphramor and then to share your own thoughts and comments on this dimension of caring within the accompanying discussion board.