Summary of Poster

Feminist Ethics of Care, as both a framework and action, is not mainstream within the neoliberal university (Gilligan, 1982; Held, 2005). Research that falls outside of the ‘status quo’ is challenging, for numerous reasons. One aspect, which has so far been under-discussed, is the ethics approach and systems of Higher Education institutions which directly and indirectly create barriers to research considered ‘alternative’. As PhD students in a UK university, we have witnessed a conflict between how we feel we must approach researching in an ethical manner, compared to how we are taught to think about ethics and conducting ethical research. 

This poster, based upon a paper we are currently developing, highlights that neoliberal university ethics procedures are far from ethical, and instead uphold violent hierarchies - not just within Higher Education institutions but in the ‘field’ and everyday life. We focus on three key neoliberal values that inform ethics procedures in academia - sanitised, detached and objective relationships with research communities; project ‘success’ driven by marketisation; and harm and risk being understood as something to be managed in order to protect against reputational damage. We further argue that these values and approaches to ethics are incompatible with the decolonial feminist ethical research praxis that foregrounds an Ethics of Care framework of ‘researching with’ rather than ‘on’ people and communities (Brannelly and Barnes, 2022). 

To make these arguments, we draw on critical feminist literature, which is sidelined in institutional ethics discussions and teaching, and on our own lived experiences of navigating ethical research dilemmas (Tuhiwai Smith, 2022; Skeggs, 2002; Hill-Collins, 2000; Graham, 2007). In particular, we highlight that an Ethics of Care is rooted in Black feminist, African and Indigenous approaches to knowing, being and relationality, such as Ubuntu (Chisale, 2018). We suggest that drawing upon this ethics framework requires us to genuinely care about communities and ourselves as a form of resistance, in a way that goes beyond and against neoliberal expectations. 

While we recognise that we will always be complicit to some extent in reinforcing the hierarchies and harms perpetuated by neoliberal institutions (Joseph-Salisbury and Connelly, 2021), we hope our critical collaborative autoethnographic approach to this research will help others to think comprehensively about their own definition and application of ethics. Hence, careful (re)consideration of how our understanding of ethics reverberates ‘in the real world’ is necessary to make decisions in research fitting with an Ethics of Care, at postgraduate level and beyond.

References

Brannelly, T. and Barnes, M. (2022). Researching with Care: Applying Feminist Care Ethics to Research Practice. Bristol: Policy Press.

Chisale, S.S. (2018). Ubuntu as care: Deconstructing the gendered Ubuntu. Verbum et Ecclesia, 39. [Online]. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/ve.v39i1.1790. [Accessed 16 January 2025].

Gilligan, C. (1982). In a Different Voice. Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Harvard University Press.

Graham, M. (2007). The ethics of care, black women and the social professions: Implications of a new analysis. Ethics and Social Welfare, 1(2), pp. 194–206. [Online]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/17496530701450372. [Accessed 16 January 2025].

Held, V. (2005). The ethics of care: Personal, political, and global. Oxford University Press.

Hill-Collins, P. (2000). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment ( 2nd ed.). Routledge.

​​Skeggs, B. (2002). Techniques for telling the reflexive self. In May, T. Qualitative Research in Action. London: SAGE Publications, pp.349-375.

Tuhiwai Smith, L. (2022). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (3rd ed.). London: Bloomsbury.