A Decolonial Feminist Perspective: Saving Care Ethics From White Saviorism

• In Event: Bearing Witness and the Ethics of Care

Abstract

This paper explores how care ethics, as originally theorized by Nel Noddings (1984), can be conceived as permitting and even enabling white saviorism in teaching. As care ethics is still an essential ethics for guiding teaching, instead of throwing the ethics out with its (de)colonial realities, I highlight the efforts of critical race theorists in prescribing “critical care” as the caring praxis in teaching. Applying the lens of physics of power developed by Palestinian feminist scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2014), I interpret critical care as a teaching praxis informed by a thorough appreciation of the historical and contemporary sources of oppression inflicting marginalized communities as well as the linkages between the lived experiences of BIPOC and these sources of oppression.

Author

• Yibing Quek, Teachers College, Columbia University