CareVisions: Envisioning a Care-Centred Society Within and Beyond COVID19.
The CareVisions project reflects on care experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic to explore and reimagine how we might envision future care relations, practices and policies in Ireland. It has been established by an interdisciplinary team of academics and researchers within UCC who have diverse research, policy and activist experiences in the care arena.
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp focus significant deficits and inequalities in current care practices and policies in Ireland,and raised important questions about how we think about and conceptualise care itself.
CareVisions addresses these questions by drawing on a feminist ethics of care perspective which suggests that care and caring should not be understood in narrow, functionalist terms, or in ways which creates binary categories of people/ways of being (care giver and care receiver, for example), but rather as fundamental to society and for human life to flourish.
Aims and Objectives
The overall aim of CareVisions is to develop an experience-based care ethics to reframe how we understand present and future care relations and practices in contemporary Ireland in light of the challenges and issues presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. It will do so by exploring care experiences of two groups in society: people with disabilities, and asylum seekers and refugees.
The project has 3 key objectives:
To re-imagine and envision future care relations, practices and policies drawing on and developing a feminist ethics of care approach.
To explore the social, political and ethical implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for care relations, practices and policies in Ireland.
To build a collaborative, interdisciplinary network of scholars, policymakers and community/voluntary organisations within Ireland committed to advancing knowledge, theory and public policy debate about the ethics and practice of care in Ireland.
Underpinning the whole the project is a concern to explore moral and ethical questions about the future of care, by developing an empirical ethics of care in the Irish context which both (a) advances feminist ethics of care scholarship, and (b) informs future policy debate and development on care in Ireland.
Methodology
CareVisions will utilise a range of different qualitative methodological approaches to explore the implications of COVID-19 on care relations, and re-imagine alternative care futures. These include:
Discourse analysis to explore how care (including provision for different groups) have been talked about, represented and constructed in policy documents and political and public debate during the pandemic.
A range of qualitative research methods designed to explore the social, political and ethical implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for care relations, practices and policies in Ireland, by engaging with care givers and receivers, as well as those working within the arena of care provision and policy. We seek to undertake this exploration by addressing care experiences of two groups in society: people with disabilities, and asylum seekers and refugees.
A deliberative process using citizens’ panels, to reflect on the experiences of COVID-19 and ask what we might understand by ‘good care’. The panels will explore the potential of practical pathways towards the development of what we might term a care-centred society meeting twice during the course of the project.
Hosting of a number of collaborative workshops and international speakers as a way of promoting academic, policy and public conversation and participation in debates about care issues in Irish society and beyond.
Concepts
The Feminist Ethics of Care
Since the 1980’s contributions from theorists from a variety of disciplines have developed the feminist ethics of care - a theoretical perspective which accounts for the necessity of care in human life, morality and politics. Here we outline some concepts from this literature that can support CareVisions to investigate and re-think current and future care relations.
Care as value
As the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed, we exist in relation to dependence - our own, and the dependency which arises when we care for others. We identify and demonstrate caring values through our experience of human interdependence, interrelatedness and responsiveness to others.
The values displayed in caring include reciprocity, mutuality, trust, understanding, relationship, solidarity, sensitivity, and compassion. Care ethics offers a practical morality to evaluate and renew caring values and engender a care-centred society. This moral lens is applicable to one-to-one and institutional care provision as well social, political, and economic life.
Care as relational
Caring relations connect all those giving and receiving care and care ethics considers whether familial, institutional, or political relations are capable of the caring needed to live well in this world. Our ‘nested dependencies’ demonstrate the fluidity of the positions of carer/cared for - everyone will experience these positions in their lifetime, sometimes simultaneously.
Consideration of our relationality and interdependence reveals the capabilities required to do caring: knowing we will be cared for; that we will be supported to take on care work; and that someone will take on this care work if we become dependent.
Care as practice
Recognising care as practice addresses the paid and unpaid labour involved in caring and reveals differences in caring practices across contexts. Feminist ethicists have identified features of ‘good care’ in practice - attentiveness, responsibility, responsiveness and competence.
The commodification of care and the perpetuation of gendered, raced and classed care burdens remain unresolved. The importation of migrant care workers drives ‘Global Care Chains’ and can leave care workers vulnerable to exploitation within neoliberal care markets.
Project Dates
This project runs from 2020 – 2023
Origins
The CareVisions project has been funded by the philanthropic generosity of the former Carolan Trust and the late Dr Geraldine Fennell. Dr Fennell, who died in 2014, was an accomplished scholar and academic researcher, and who received her Ph.D. in social psychology from City University of New York. Professor Fennell was a member of the board of Care Alliance Ireland and a passionate advocate for caregiving research and policy development.