Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

• Maurice Hamington ¹
• Sarah Munawar ²

¹ Portland State University

² Columbia College, Vancouver, Canada

Abstract

Care ethics is a growing interdisciplinary and international field of study within which scholars worldwide have theorized the dynamics of care as a practice, a virtue, and a collective moral responsibility. This special issue of the Journal of Philosophical Investigations explores an essential yet underdeveloped aspect of care scholarship: the relationship between caring and time, broadly construed. Caring has a spatial and temporal dimension, differentiating it from other moral approaches. Caring takes time.
Today, care ethics is enjoying worldwide interdisciplinary attention as global scholars contribute to a growing body of theoretical and applied literature across numerous disciplines. Signs of the field’s maturity include burgeoning publications, book series, journals, podcasts, and special journal issues such as this one. Nevertheless, care theory is still relatively young and has great potential for further exploration. With a few notable exceptions (Bourgault 2016; Nedelsky and Malleson 2023; Seisuke 2024), the temporal dimension of care ethics remains underexplored.
In this introduction, we map connections, divergences, and shared orientations of the authors’ articulation of care and how it is experienced in time. Every article is an exposition of the complex ways that systems of oppression, such as racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and settler-colonialism, bend, stretch, extract, rupture, refract, and steal time to structure the terms of care. The authors collectively disrupt dominant paradigms of time, progress, and care by foregrounding caring labor's relational, affective, and political dimensions, particularly concerning women, racialized communities, disabled bodies, and care-workers.

Keywords

• Care ethics
• temporalities
• feminist philosophy
• decolonizing theory

Main Subjects

• philosophy