Re-imagining care: thinking with feminist ethics of care
Date
2018-07-11
Authors
Thomson, Jenny
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Abstract
The term care has been part of the CYC title since the University of Victoria School of Child and Youth Care (CYC) opened in the 1970’s, making care a central aspect of CYC’s public and professional identity. The purpose of this research is to explore how care is conceptualized in Foundations of Child and Youth Care Practice; a Canadian textbook widely used in CYC postsecondary education programs. This text introduces future CYC practitioners to important aspects of CYC praxis, such as care. In this research I use the Trace method developed by Selma Sevenhuijsen (2004) to analyze the text. In this analysis, feminist ethics of care acts both as a lens for analyzing care and as a framework for renewing ways of thinking about and doing care in CYC. Key findings show that conceptualizations of care in the text are deeply influenced by neoliberal ‘justice’ frameworks leading to care being framed as always ‘good’ and understood as apolitical, simple and instrumental. This reveals a lack of theorizing about care in the text and suggests that understandings of care are taken for granted and devalued. These conceptualizations of care cannot account for the complexities of the care relationship and do not adequately reflect the lived experience of young people and families. This research advocates for engagement with feminist ethics of care as a starting point for re-imagining care in CYC and offers suggestions for what this might look like.
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Keywords
Trace method, CYC, Foundations of Child and Youth Care Practice, Care, Feminist ethics of care, Relational ontology, Child and youth care