Abstrakt
The main aim of the Biograf special issue on caring was to explore multiple relations between various caring practices and conceptualisations of care in moral philosophy and social sciences. The non-dualistic and agnostic spatial concept of 'besides', developed in the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, has been used to open up the conceptual space for imagining different relations between practice and theory of care and their related normativities.
The authors who have come together on the pages of this special issue use different theoretical frameworks - ranging from ethics of care to empirical ethics and maintenance studies - and focus on a wide spectrum of everyday and professional practices, e.g. social and health care services, public administration, or academic and research work. And yet, despite methodological and conceptual differences and occasional polemics, their contributions seem to have at least two important things in common.
First, they are interested in what happens when the object - human or non-human - of caring practice or research is taken seriously 'on its own terms' and when it is diligently re-scribed with its their benefit in mind. And second, they acknowledge the multiplicity of the objects, subjects, and strategies of caring.
Thus, in the rendering of our authors, care comes out as both transformative and multiple, offering powerful tools for 'doing good', while not legislating in advance what that 'good' should be in various particular situations.