Care-full scholarship to me is…
Within FCE scholarship care is widely thought of as a three-dimensional concept made of ‘maintenance work’, ‘affective engagement’ and ‘ethico-political involvement’ (Tronto 2013; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). The doings and workings of each of these components serve to nurture an ongoing and hands-on process of re-imagining and re-creating ‘as well as possible’ relations. As such they also serve as a helpful point of orientation for transitioning in this Unit from thinking more abstractly about care theory to applying it in a scholarly context to re-imagine and re-create the academy as a world of care-full practice – ie. care-full scholarship.
The idea of care as comprising ‘maintenance work’ speaks to the need for the practicing of care to require sustained effort and to be approached as an ongoing endeavour rather than a one-off event. It also speaks to the fact that whilst care work may well include elements of profoundness, it may just as often be configured around the mundane.
Affective engagement points to the frequently emotional nature of care (Milligan and Wiles 2010; Kittay 2001). This connects us to the idea, presented in Unit 1, of the embodied researcher. It is also something which we return to shortly, in Lesson 3 of this current Unit, in connection with the quality of passion.
Alongside, the dimension of ethico-political involvement offers a way to ultimately re-claim care as a means to foster solidarities, amidst unavoidable tensions and conflicts, while experimenting with more just ways of being and doing, i.e. of ‘caring-with’ (Tronto, 2013); something which is relevant especially, but by no means only, to the field of (social) sustainability science with which this MOOC is most closely aligned.
Guided by these three dimensions, and the FCE literature more broadly, in Lesson 2 we introduce a Care-full scholarship framework. In the remaining Lessons and Units of this MOOC we then draw on this framework, in combination with a range of examples and guest contributions from both early career and more established scholars, to illustrate and prompt discussion about what the practicing of care-full scholarship may involve. This includes some of the various different forms that it might take, settings it may take place in, and in turn how it creates a potential pathway for transforming academic institutions into more just, collaborative and inclusive communities of learning and practice – care-full spaces.
By way of an opening taster for what is to follow, we invite you now to watch the below video medley in which a number of the guest contributors featured in this Unit begin by providing a sound bite response to the same question that we asked you to consider just now: “what does care-full scholarship mean to me?”
We asked the same question at a workshop with students from the University of Vermont. Their responses are captured in this word cloud:
