Joan C. Tronto

The 2015 winner of the Brown Democracy Medal, Joan C. Tronto, argues in Who Cares? that we need to rethink American democracy, as well as our own fundamental values and commitments, from a caring perspective. Asserting that Americans are facing a "caring deficit"—that there are simply too many demands on our time to care adequately for children, elderly people, and ourselves—she asks us to reconsider how we allocate care responsibilities. At the same time, while democratic politics should help citizens to care better, most people see caring as unsupported by public life and deem the concerns of politics as too remote from their lives to make a difference in this sphere. Tronto traces the reasons for this disconnect and argues for the need to make care, not economics, the central concern of democratic political life.

How to Reshape a Democratic Politics

Who Cares?

Americans now face a caring deficit: there are simply too many demands on people’s time for us to care adequately for our children, elderly people, and ourselves.At the same time, political involvement in the United States is at an all-time low, and although political life should help us to care better, people see caring as unsupported by public life and deem the concerns of politics as remote from their lives. Caring Democracy argues that we need to rethink American democracy, as well as our fundamental values and commitments, from a caring perspective. The idea that production and economic life are the most important political and human concerns ignores the reality that caring, for ourselves and others, should be the highest value that shapes how we view the economy, politics, and institutions such as schools and the family. Care is at the center of our human lives, but Tronto argues it is currently too far removed from the concerns of politics. Caring Democracy traces the reasons for this disconnection and argues for the need to make care, not economics, the central concern of democratic political life. Joan C. Tronto is a Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (Routledge).

Markets, Equality, and Justice

Caring Democracy

Vivienne Bozalek

Michalinos Zembylas

This book makes an important contribution to ongoing debates about the epistemological, ethical, ontological and political implications of relational ethics in higher education. By furthering theoretical developments on the ethics of care and critical posthumanism, it speaks to contemporary concerns for more socially just possibilities and enriched understandings of higher education pedagogies. The book considers how the political ethics of care and posthuman/new feminist materialist ethics can be diffracted through each other and how this can have value for thinking about higher education pedagogies. It includes ideas on ethics which push those boundaries that have previously served educational researchers and proposes new ways of conceptualising relational ethics. Chapters consider the entangled connections of the linguistic, social, material, ethical, political and biological in relation to higher education pedagogies. This topical and transdisciplinary book will be of great interest for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of posthuman and care ethics, social justice in education, higher education, and educational theory and policy.

Posthuman and Political Care Ethics for Reconfiguring Higher Education Pedagogies

This work contests the association of care with women alone as empirically and historically inaccurate, as well as politically unwise. It goes on to illustrate the ways in which society degrades the importance of caring in order to maintain the power of those who are privileged.

Joan C. Tronto

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