ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on Joan Tronto’s notions of a political ethics of care and feminist new materialist and posthumanist scholarship which foreground the complex enmeshment of humans with each other and with the planet, and trouble the binarisms of body-mind, rationality-affect, self-other, culture-nature, amongst others. This chapter attempts to think with and through an ethics of care, and ontologies and epistemologies of relationality towards imagining alternative ways of doing and making scholarship. These include imagining and experimenting with pedagogical and research practices which are framed within caring and careful ethics of engagement and relationality. Drawing on some examples of such work that has been engaged in within a Women’s and Gender Studies Department and students’ narratives, this chapter unpacks a number of key provocations for reconceptualising pedagogical practices, including the importance of disrupting relations of authority and the power it extends over students and “subjects” of research; challenging disembodiedness and the erasure of affect; and promoting practices of self-care, joy and pleasure.
