A new book co-edited by York University Professor Alan Blum explores the ethical foundations of caregiving in health, and includes expertise from a number of contributors affiliated with York University.
The Ethics of Care: Moral Knowledge, Communication, and the Art of Caregiving is edited by Blum and Stuart J. Murray and is organized around the themes of culture as a restraint on caregiving in different social contexts and situations, innovative methods in healthcare, and the way in which culture works to position care as part of a rhetorical approach to dependency, responsibility and justice.
The book presents case studies that examine institutional responses to end-of-life issues, the notion of informed consent, biomedicine, Indigenous rights and post-colonialism in care, and theoretical approaches to the concept of care.
It offers discussions from various disciplinary approaches including sociology, communication and social theory, as well as hermeneutics, phenomenology and deconstruction.
The Ethics of Care will appeal to scholars across the social science with interests in healthcare, medicine, justice and in the question of how we think about care as a notion and social form, and its relationship to practice.
Blum is executive eirector of the Culture of Cities Centre and senior professor of sociology and communication and culture at York University. He is the author of The Grey Zone in Health and Illness, Theorizing, The Imaginative Structure of the City, and The Lived Experience of the Dying Body, and co-author of On the Beginning of Social Inquiry and Self-Reflection in the Arts and Sciences.
Murray is professor and Canada Research Chair in rhetoric and ethics in the Department of English Language and Literature and the Department of Health Sciences at Carleton University, Canada. He is co-editor of Critical Interventions in the Ethics of Healthcare: Challenging the Principle of Autonomy in Bioethics.
Other contributors affiliated with York University include:
Diego Llovet, a behavioral scientist with the Cancer Screening Unit at Cancer Care Ontario, where he conducts studies to inform the design and improvement of province-wide cancer screening programs and related health services. Llovet received his PhD (2012) and MA from York University and his undergraduate degree from the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina. He is a past holder of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Doctoral Fellowship.
Philip Walsh, an associate professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at York University. His research interests include social theory, the sociology of knowledge, and the philosophy of social science. He is the author of Skepticism, Modernity and Critical Theory (Palgrave 2003) and Arendt Contra Sociology: Rethinking Theory, Society and its Science (Ashgate 2015).
Han Zhang, a PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication and Culture at York University. Her work is concerned with the notion of care in the cross-cultural context and how culture influences an individual’s subjectivity as a dialectical and topological process. Han is a recipient of the Ontario Trillium Scholarship and York Graduate Scholarship.