ABSTRACT
The intersection of multiculturalism, forced migration, Aboriginal and First Nations’ decolonisation efforts and the ‘hybrid’ cosmopolitan nature of the Western identity have provided the terrain to challenge and reconsider the dominance of Western epistemology. It is in this terrain that normative ideas about care and caring are being contested, displaced and challenged. In this chapter, I speak from the ‘periphery’ to transcend the accepted and ethnocentric understandings of care and caring to theorise care as ambiguous and even contradictory at times. This ‘marginal’ perspective speaks of care and caring as a radical struggle occurring relationally in moments between resisting and accepting care. Caring, in this context, becomes a meeting point, border-less and frontier-less, where the only certainty is that care is peripheral and that caring happens in this marginality. How this ‘periphery’ and ‘marginal’ perspective of care might add to critical social work practice is explored in the chapter. No definitive answers are offered, however, as this would reinscribe the power and privilege of Western epistemology that demands theory be a linear presentation of conclusive ideas. In speaking from the periphery and the margins, this chapter aims to add a critical post-colonial perspective that privileges ways of thinking from the periphery. This is where the ethic of care becomes about accepting how marginal caring is and how transformative this marginality can be for re-framing care as an act of refusing and resisting oppression.
