Learning About and Through Care: Care as an Object of and Pathway to Sociological Knowledge

• In Event: Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 16: Theorizing Organizations

Abstract

Influenced by feminist intellectual movements, sociologists began a sustained engagement with caring as a social practice and form of reproductive labor in the 1970s. Work in this tradition typically positions care as an object of scholarly investigation, but it has tended to separate the enactment of caring practices and labors from the activity of sociological knowledge production. In this paper, I question this gap by focusing attention on the epistemological dimensions of care and by asking how care work, broadly understood, might offer an unrecognized pathway to sociological knowledge. In the first section, I examine theoretical work about care epistemology developed in the context of feminist philosophy. This section centers Vrinda Dalmiya’s (2002; 2016) analysis of care as an intellectual virtue but also considers the complications that arise in Dalmiya’s framework when caring practices are situated in the context of social and political inequalities that often shape interactions and relationships between those who care and those who are cared for. The second section brings this work into dialogue with sociological analyses of care work. I aim to demonstrate growing interest in the idea that caring relationships and practices can serve as a pathway to sociological knowledge, despite the oppressive circumstances under which they often unfold. The third section extends this dialogue by exploring possibilities for cross-fertilization between philosophical work on care epistemology and theoretical constructs of standpoint and perspectival realism in sociology. Finally, the fourth section describes concrete examples of sociological knowledge produced in and through relationships and practices of care. I examine the work of a classical sociologist, Jane Addams, and a contemporary one, Mary Romero, as well as the work of STS scholar Max Liboiron, to generate insight into the epistemological potential of caring relationships with research collaborators.

Author

• Michael Haedicke, University of Maine