30DoS 2020 - Day 7

Joan Tronto

Tronto is a political scientist and care ethicist, and her classic Moral Boundaries is a must-read for everyone interested in the care ethics movement. There are other notable and interesting ethics of care theorists that could be featured here, such as Nel Noddings, Virginia Held, Michael Slote, Annette Baier, Carol Gilligan and Sara Ruddick, to name just a few. Tronto’s work is important from a deeply political point of view. In Moral Boundaries, she argues that the boundaries between ethics and politics, public and private, are not as clear cut as they may seem. Ethical question must be analysed from a political point of view, and vice versa, and therefore taking an impersonal point of view in either would be deeply problematic. Tronto has long argued that care is at the centre on human lives. In a 2013 book, Caring democracy, Tronto asks us to look again at how gender, race, class, and market forces misallocate caring responsibilities, and how to make caring more just. Political and economic life often ignores the reality of caring, self-care and care for others, informal and formal caring, but Tronto insists that care should be the highest value that shapes how we view the economy, politics, and institutions.

A lecture by Tronto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91g5IvWDhqk

Tronto, J. C. (1993). Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. London: Routledge.

Tronto, J. C. (2013). Caring democracy: Markets, equality, and justice. New York: New York University Press.

Tronto, J. C. (2015). Who cares? How to reshape a democratic politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Feedly

Stephen Downes recently described Feedly as “the primary source for most of my daily links and keeps me up-to-date on a daily basis” (link), which is a pretty good endorsement for whom connecting people to ideas is a big part of his work. Feedly is an RSS reader, which means it can capture updates from almost any website and bring them all together into one site. Want to know what’s in the latest edition of a journal, or get the latest news from the CPN, just put the address into Feedly and it will update you every day.

Link to website: https://feedly.com

Link to YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs-3RoE0W9M5ooEwI4eOFZw

The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit

In this exquisitely written new book by the author of A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit explores the ways we make our lives out of stories, and how we are connected by empathy, by narrative, by imagination. In the course of unpacking some of her own stories—of her mother and her decline from memory loss, of a trip to Iceland, of an illness—Solnit revisits fairytales and entertains other stories: about arctic explorers, Che Guevara among the leper colonies, and Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, about warmth and coldness, pain and kindness, decay and transformation, making art and making self. Woven together, these stories create a map which charts the boundaries and territories of storytelling, reframing who each of us is and how we might tell our story.

Link to book: http://www.rebeccasolnit.net/book/the-faraway-nearby/