Locating Care Ethics Beyond the Global North

Abstract

In care ethics, caring is seen to be embedded in practice and locally contingent. However, despite a large and thriving literature on care practices as they vary across the globe, the implications of the different meanings and geohistories of care for the ethics of care have hardly been addressed. Rather, most theorisations of care ethics have implicitly conceptualised care as a universal practice or drawn on care as practised in the global North. This paper argues that care ethics needs emplacing and this emplacement should extend beyond sites in the global North so that feminist theories of care can take account of the diversity of care practices globally. Moreover, given the increasing globalisation of care, different notions of care meet. As care is relational and enacted across space, the differences in care ethics between places have to be negotiated. This paper, therefore, calls not just for recognising multiplicity in care ethics or even multicultural care ethics, but for theorising the relations between different kinds of care and the ethics that drive them. Finally, both care relations and understandings of care are dynamic; they alter as people migrate which too needs consideration. This paper argues that such a relational and dynamic understanding of varied care offers new theoretical, political and empirical agendas both within geography and for feminist theory.