Abstract
Can the conceptual framework of ‘caring democracy’ be applied beyond the time and place where it first emerged? The chapters in this volume suggest so. Yet several dangers exist. First, such applications may be so remote as to render the concept of ‘caring democracy’ unintelligible. Second, past experience with western discourses, including discourses of care, suggest that they can become justifications for colonial and imperial domination. Many scholars have begun to propose ways in which scholars of care can avoid such dangers, drawing upon frameworks such as dislocation, solidarity, cosmopolitanism, intersectionality, and virtue. This chapter argues, though, the solution needs to arise out of the practices of a political conception of caring democracy itself, most especially, in thinking about and acting to foreground responsibility for more democratic practices in concrete and global frameworks. Some promising directions for doing so are proposed.
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Notes
- 1.
And, of course, I have had the privilege of an academic position in a country in the Global North which has allowed me to become a scholar of these questions. It is important to keep always in mind the power dimensions that create such privileges and who benefits.
- 2.
- 3.
Compare Marion Smiley’s critique of paternalism in this volume.
- 4.
On the harmful nature of protectionist care discourses, see Young (2003).
- 5.
Among exceptions, see, for example, Mignon Duffy (2011).
- 6.
“Living as I have argued we do in the wake of slavery, in spaces where we were never meant to survive, or have been punished for surviving and for daring to claim or make spaces of something like freedom, we yet reimagine and transform spaces for an practices of an ethics of care (as in repair, maintenance, attention), an ethics of seeing, and of being in the wake as consciousness; as a way of remembering and observance that started with the door of no return, continued in the hold of the ship and on the shore” (Sharpe 2016, 130–131).
- 7.
Of course, this is not to assert that all second- and perhaps third-generation care ethics writings address this issue.
- 8.
To demonstrate this point thoroughly would go beyond the limits of this short chapter; indeed, it would require a retelling of much of recent feminist thought about disputes between more universalistic thinkers such as Martha Nussbaum and critics of that approach, including, for example, Mahadevan (also in this volume).
- 9.
Another example of this problem is the treatment of worthy refugees in Europe.
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Tronto, J.C. (2020). Caring Democracy: How Should Concepts Travel?. In: Urban, P., Ward, L. (eds) Care Ethics, Democratic Citizenship and the State. International Political Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41437-5_9
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