Care Ethics

Objective: Care is a multidimensional concept that has been reflected in the process of modernity. The aim of this study was to investigate care ethics among female students of Guilan University. Methods: In this research, a qualitative method based on semi-structured interviews and purposive sampling was used. The statistical sample includes 33 students of Guilan University. In total, 11 interviewees were interviewed as a group and 22 interviewees as an individual. The analysis method in this research was thematic analysis. Results:  In data analysis, twelve basic themes, three organizing themes, and one global theme were obtained. The first type was autonomous girls: these types of girls are less inclined to marriage and maternal roles and less interested in circular motherhood and more inclined to linear time and they believed that a circular mother is a boring role that will reduce their agency. The second was heteronomous girls: these types of female students were in maximal motherhood level because they have known a mother with the semiotic such as sacrifice, kindness, self-sacrifice, altruism, etc. Third types of girls were eclectic: this type of female student has both a tendency to linear time (employment and education) and a cyclical time (marriage and motherhood). Conclusion:  Among the existing types, the ideal form was eclectic ethics in which female students have two ethics of heteronomy and autonomy (semiotic and symbolic).

Care ethics emphasizes the incessant nature of the work of care. The other-oriented focus of care work and the asymmetric relation between the one-caring and the cared-for entails a normative commitment to a cyclical conception of living time on the part of the one-caring. Moreover, in care, we must think of the time of the self as intertwined with the time of the other, thus constituting a mutual temporality. However, from the perspective of a feminist phenomenology of time, potential moral harms can be identified in the temporal structure of care, which may cause caring time to degenerate into uncaring time for the one-caring. To avoid such a predicament, it is imperative to develop an emancipatory ethics of time at the heart of the relational ontology of care. I argue that when various modalities of living time in care sediment into a coherentist ontology of time, only then is there a degradation into uncaring time. To positively reconstruct a radical notion of caring time, we must build a disruptive ontology within our conception of caring time, which highlights the significance of rupture, dissonance, disruption, and distortion within the everydayness of care. The argument in the paper serves a normative purpose since it draws our attention to what we owe morally to the one-caring in terms of their time. My analysis weaves together care ethics, feminist phenomenology and feminist writing from India through a philosophical engagement with Amar Jiban by Rassundari Devi.

Poetry ferments space-time travel. Engaging with poetry can disrupt the drumbeat of neoliberal temporal demands by providing a mindful opportunity for intimate connections with people we do not know. Sitting with a poet’s words can represent a pause that takes us out of one time and shifts us to another. A poem may connect the reader with people who have passed from this earth, suggesting that caring moral imagination is not circumscribed to the living. This article explores selections from Janice N. Harrington’s collection, The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home. Harrington’s poems delve into the physical intimacy of care workers and the cared-for, which is otherwise reserved for our society's private sphere of family settings, thereby extending the concept of poetry of witness to a small, intimate, albeit institutionalized setting that, at its core, exists to provide care to others. Specific poems are interrogated for their implications for the reader’s experience of space-time travel, including strengthening the skills of the caring imagination beyond the experience of the words. Poetry allows the reader to travel back to a witnessed event, engaging with shifts in time and space within the parameters of the poem while helping us develop our imaginative skills to continue witnessing experiences and enhance our ability to care in the present and future. The caring imagination required to engage with the poetry of witness is not a static capacity. Instead, through poetry, our imaginative skills can be further cultivated to help us empathetically space-time travel.