In the last entry I suggested how to apply a WPR way of thinking to a wide range of topics. I see the WPR questions as a prompt to think about governing practices in uncommon but useful ways – teasing out deep-seated epistemological and ontological assumptions, developing a genealogy of the topic’s emergence, reflecting on silencing practices in problem representations, and examining interconnected effects (discursive, subjectification and lived) (Bacchi 2009). Whenever one spots a proposal (read broadly) about how things ought to be done, the opportunity arises to ask: what is the “problem” represented to be? And with what effects? The preceding entry posited the usefulness of this approach in contrast to a common focus on competing interpretations of issues. In this and in the subsequent entry, I suggest applying the WPR questions to two topics central to the literature on Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality: first, to the Feminist Ethic of Care (this entry); and second, to Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly and other deliberative forums (next entry). 

WPR and the Feminist Ethic of Care (FEC): Mixing methods?

As in the preceding entry I take as my starting point Loughnane and Edwards’ (2022) analytic agenda:

“Our analytical framework seeks to integrate Carol Bacchi’s (2009) notion of problematisation with an FEC lens to interrogate and potentially expand how societies represent and act on care.”

In this entry I consider whether, or not, this “integration” is possible and/or useful. To do so I reflect on the three key terms in the FEC –  “feminist”, “ethic” and “care” – asking how these concepts represent the “problem”, their underlying assumptions and their effects. In other words, I bring a WPR lens to an FEC, described as either “a Feminist Ethic of Care” or “the Feminist Ethnic of Care”. 

The question of whether it is possible to integrate or “blend” WPR with other analytic stances has arisen as a topic in several previous Research Hub entries. Many authors have endorsed the need to “supplement” WPR in specific ways, often because of a desire to have more specific value commitments and clear-cut reform agendas. In their exposition of CDPR (critical discourse problematization framework), Van Aswegan et al. (2019) defend the need for a “good cop/bad cop” approach to research methods, with WPR characterized as the “bad cop” while a form of Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1995; Hyatt 2013) serves as the “good cop”. The overall argument is that WPR provides questions while CDPR, which the authors describe as a “structural” and “problem-oriented” approach” (pp. 187, 195), provides “evidence” for, or answers to, those questions.

In an earlier Research Hub entry (31 August 2021) I make the case that contrasting paradigmatic assumptions sharply distinguish WPR from CDA, challenging Van Aswegan et al.’s (2019: 186, 195) description of the approaches as “complementary” and “in harmony”. I highlight how their focus on rhetoric and a form of “ideology critique” sits in contrast to the emphasis in WPR on deep-seated epistemological and ontological assumptions. In drawing this contrast, paradigms are understood to reflect competing worldviews due to contrasting ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions (Alvesson and Sandberg 2011: 255).

On this topic I find helpful Van Aswegan et al.’s distinction between, on the one hand, theoretical lenses, such as Critical Disability Studies, Post-Colonial Studies or feminist studies and, on the other hand, theoretical tools, such as Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA; Fairclough 1995) or critical higher education policy discourse analysis (CHEPDA; Hyatt 2013). In my understanding “tools” provide analytic techniques whereas “lenses” can be said to refer to selected aspects of social relations (topic areas). I would add that “tools” reflect contrasting paradigms whereas “lenses” can and do cross paradigmatic lines. For example, both disability studies (Meekosha and Shuttleworth 2009) and feminist studies (Davis, 2008; Scott 2005) are characterized by intense internal debates about paradigmatic assumptions.

In terms of the heuristic distinction between “lenses” and “tools”, WPR provides a “tool” for critical analysis that can be applied using a variety of “lenses” – e.g., disability studies (see Apelmo 2021), post-colonial studies (see Gordon 2011), feminists’ studies (see O’Hagan 2020). If such is the case, why do I express concern about “integrating” WPR and FEC? To answer this question requires a closer look at the FEC. 

WPR and the Feminist Ethic of Care (FEC): contrasting paradigms? 

I want to suggest that FEC is put forward as a “tool” rather than as a “lens”. Rather than paying heed to the intense debates within feminism about paradigmatic issues, such as subjectivity and knowledge, it weds itself to a particular stance. As described in the preceding entry, Loughnane and Edwards (2022) adopt a popular convention of examining care through three outlooks: care as value, care as relation and care as practice: 

“Care as value attends to the values displayed in undertaking, receiving and thinking about care (Held, 2006). The relationality of care recognises human interdependence within care relations, the fluidity of carer/ care receiver positions and connections between those relations ‘closest in’ to wider socio-political contexts (Barnes, 2012; Tronto, 2013). Approaching care as practice illustrates the labour involved in caring and the differences of care in intimate, institutional and commodified context.”

Some of the commitments I would associate with FEC sit more comfortably with a WPR stance than others. For example, there appears to be a shared relational ontology. Loughnane and Edwards (2022) describe FEC “as a political theory that understands human interdependence and relationality as fundamental (Held, 2007; Kittay, 2020; Daly, 2021). The focus on interdependence is put forward as a challenge to “the current neoliberal care limits”, in which care is a “closed circuit of ideas”, “thought of only in three ways: as personal responsibility, as family responsibility and as a problem for the market”. Usefully, Sevenhuijsen (2004: 36) characterizes an ethic of care as based upon a “weak ontology”. She identifies one element as “ambiguity”, which acknowledges that “life situations are always open to a range of interpretations”. However, the tendency to portray FEC as a kind of knowledge and the ways in which “care” is conceptualized in terms of “values” produce more problematic premises. 

FEC: “subjugated knowledge” or “situated knowledge”?

Loughnane and Edwards (2022) describe FEC as a “subjugated knowledge”, “in Foucauldian terms”. Sevenhuijsen (2004: 43) refers to an ethic of care as “situated knowledge”. Do these two terms mean the same thing and what sorts of claims are being advanced in relation to each?

In two previous Research Hub entries (3 Sept and 17 Sept 2018) I develop the argument that “situated knowledge” is tied to an assumption of epistemic privilege. Without oversimplifying Haraway’s (1988: 584) argument, her references to “situated knowledges” as “preferred” positions makes a claim that “vision is better from below” (583), that is, from groups positioned (or situated) as oppressed: “they seem to promise more adequate, sustained, objective, transforming accounts of the world”. 

By contrast, in the notion of “subjugated knowledge” Foucault is not claiming that any particular group has privileged access to “truth”; rather, he insists that truth claims are always political claims. In Foucault, the thing to examine in relation to “psychological knowledge”, for example, is its effects, not its truth. What needs to be questioned resides “in the political character of what it creates rather than in the epistemic character of its claims” (May 2006: 94-95).

Despite the reference to “subjugated knowledge” Loughnane and Edwards (2022) tend to privilege an account of experience in their elaboration of an ethic of care. They describe how the CA’s (Citizens’ Assembly for Gender Equality) care module made “efforts to centre individuals’ experiences of care”. However, the characterization of subjects as reliable sources of information (due to their “experiences”) depends upon the same independent and autonomous subject presumed in neoliberal accounts. 

Scott (1991: 792) puts the contrasting poststructural position: “Do not accept categories of evidence or structures of context as given, but instead view them as actively constituted within discourse”. With this starting point, WPR highlights the subjectification effects of governing mechanisms. It also emphasizes the importance of self-problematization as an acknowledgement of the need to question one’s categories and the assumptions they reply upon (Bacchi 2009). These issues are not addressed in the FEC literature that I have read. 

FEC and normativity

Sevenhuijsen (2004: 14) associates the ethic of care with a “moral framework”. There is interest in “the moral motivations that people employ in their actual daily practices” and an endorsement of “moral attitudes or virtues like altruism, compassion or unconditional love” (27). This moral framework is clear in the identification of an ethic of care with care as a value. As noted above, Loughnane and Edwards (2022) elaborate that “Care as value attends to the values displayed in undertaking, receiving and thinking about care (Held, 2006)”. Joan Tronto (2013) proposes that each phase of care is intrinsically linked to a specific value or virtue/quality: attentiveness, responsibility, competence and responsiveness. Sevenhuijsen (2004: 37) adds “trust as a fifth item to these core values”. 

Together with Chris Beasley I have written about the political limitations of analyses that link ethical behaviour to the development of certain kinds of character traits among citizens (Beasley and Bacchi 2007). In our view the assumed mechanisms by which “engaging in the practice of care” becomes a moral attitude (Sevenhuijsen 2004: 43) that may be translated to the public and international domains are taken for granted rather than explained. 

Associated with this stance, I detect a point of tension between the FEC and WPR on the question of reform. My reading on the FEC suggests that its advocates display a greater willingness to be prescriptive than is associated with WPR thinking. Sevenhuijsen (2004: 40; emphasis added) lists the “concrete questions of policy measures” that in her view follow an ethic of care analysis: “What can stay in? What should be removed? What should be modified? What should be added?” The kind of poststructural analysis associated with WPR does not prescribepolitical positions. Rather, it institutes a commitment to a form of ongoing critique, “an open-ended provocation of the problematic” (Osborne, 2003, p. 7).

In Poststructural Policy Analysis (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 25), Sue Goodwin and I directly confront the question of whether, or not, it is possible to support an egalitarian politics while refusing to advocate specific reforms (i.e. to refuse to be prescriptive). There we argue that, not only are the two perspectives compatible; they are actually necessary to each other. This is because reform programs often buy into problematic premises that need highlighting and questioning. As Brown (1998, p. 44) argues, the aim is

“to make visible why particular positions and visions of the future occur to us, and especially to reveal when and where those positions work in the same register of ‘political rationality’ as that which they purport to criticize”.

Such a situation arises, I suggest, in any singular understanding of “feminism”.

FEC, WPR and Feminism

The language of “a” or “the” Feminist Ethic of Care seems to assume a singular political stance. I was surprised to see little engagement with the well-recognized tensions and disputes within a broadly designated “feminist” community (see above regarding the intense internal debates about conflicting paradigmatic assumptions). 

In an earlier Research Hub entry (1 Sept 2019) I explain that I do not characterize WPR as “feminist” in any clear and obvious sense because I do not believe that feminism has a clear or obvious meaning. I have always considered feminism to be a contested space embracing diverse objectives and methodologies. Hence, I feel some discomfort with the suggestion that one can “think like a feminist” (Gherardi 2019: 45) or that “feminist aims” are readily identifiable and agreed upon (Kantola and Lombardo 2017: 329). In line with this thinking, I endorse the practice of using, wherever possible, a plural form, such as “feminisms”, “to indicate that those who call themselves feminists do not necessarily see the world in the same way” (Bacchi 2017: 36 fn 1). In this same spirit I now refer to “feminists’ theories” rather than to “feminist theory” (see above for “feminists’ studies”).

Care: to define or not to define

And so we come in the end to “care”, a slippery concept as is well-acknowledged among those who endorse the FEC. The CareVisions Report, entitled Re-Envisioning a Care-Centred Society in Ireland Beyond COVID-19, specified the need to “Clarify and reframe language and narratives around care, acknowledging the diverse meanings (both positive and negative) that the term care holds for different groups in society” (Edwards et al., 2023: 14). Alongside this recognition (in the very next paragraph) the Report stipulates the need to “recognise that care is central to human life”. It seems, then, that we are stuck with the word.

Loughnane and Edwards (2022) explain that their study focused on “how care itselfwas represented at the CA” (italics in original). This focus meant that their analysis targeted solely “the care module” (the CA was organized by modules). This decision meant that issues raised in the “work and social protection module” were side-lined. These issues included “gendered issues in low pay (of which care work emerged as an exemplar) and welfare entitlements, including the impact of care responsibilities on these”. It seems, therefore, that the demarcation of specific items as to do with “care” already worked to shape the boundaries of what was included/excluded. As Bové (1990, p. 5) argues, therefore, “key terms are finally more important for their place within intellectual practices, than they are for what they may be said to ‘mean’ in the abstract”. 

Dahl (2017) brings this perspective to existing research on care and how to develop a new analytic. She argues that it is time to stop asking “What is care?”, a question that risks essentializing “care” (p. 61). Instead, we need to reflect on how we think about care, asking: “How are the changing conditions of care and an attention to power and struggles reframing our theorizing about care?” (p. 62; italics in original). Here the point is that how we talk or theorize about care reflects the changing political landscapes we inhabit. Hence “care” is a “moving feast”; it is unwise theoretically to speak about “it” as a “thing”.

Changing the target of analysis from “care” as a “thing” to how we talk about or theorize care means examining critically the concepts we use – asking what they allow us to see and what they (may) leave out. This self-problematizing approach to research is highlighted in the undertaking in WPR to apply the WPR questions to one’s own problem representations. 

Conclusion

While I found the new publications on care ethics and the CA evocative and thought-provoking, it may have been useful to take on board greater “self” scrutiny – a willingness to question the FEC framework, to point to the ambivalence of invoking “moral” values, and to the complexities and pluralities in contemporary feminisms. In this context, WPR becomes a useful “self-problematising” tool. If this critical approach is deemed to be unfeasible politically, we face some important issues that need to be discussed. In the next entry, I ask what may be gained from bringing WPR to the whole notion/practice of deliberative forums, targeting Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly for Gender Equality. 

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