Politics, human flourishing, and bodily knowing: a critical theory of embodied care

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Mann, Hollie S.
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Political Science

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This project investigates the relationship between human flourishing, politics and care. I consider how politics can stifle or foster citizens' potential to attain and practice the virtue of care and why this matters for politics. In this work, I make three principal contributions to our study of care: First, we must begin to see care as more than a means to other ends. Care not only helps us achieve political ends like autonomy, justice, and equality, but it is also an activity that should be done for its own sake. Second, the best citizen is a caring one, a claim that contrasts deeply with conventional understandings of citizenship, both ancient and modern. Others have articulated care's importance to democratic citizenship, but what we need now is a more capacious understanding of what it takes to create a caring subject and what political work is required to sustain citizens' practices of care. This requires reimagining ourselves, as well as thinking through the civic structures, institutions, and policies that are most compatible with an understanding of a caring self. Third, my conception of care as an embodied practice illuminates the relationship between bodies, inequality, and carework. I consider how a particular kind of embodied politics can activate and sustain an ethic that cultivates citizens' capacities and desires to care.

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	Politics, human flourishing, and bodily knowing : a critical theory of embodied care	2019-04-12	Public	Download