CareVisions: Enacting the Feminist Ethics of Care in Empirical Research

ABSTRACT

CareVisions (2022–2026) is an interdisciplinary researcj project reflecting on care experiences during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic to re-imagine care relations, practices and policies in Ireland and internationally. Inspired by feminist ethics of care perspectives and Irish traditions of relatedness and living in the community, epitomised in the quote: Is ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine (We live in each other's shadow and in each other's shelter) (Higgins, M. 2021. Letter from the President of Ireland to the President of the United States of America, 20thJanuary 2021. Accessed 18 January 2022. https://twitter.com/PresidentIRL/status/1352162151817949184?s=20Q2), CareVisions prioritises the creation of deliberative and participative spaces to enable care debates from a wide and diverse range of voices. Thus, the project's essence required examination of and attention to ‘care-full' internal and external working relations. Informed by an advisory group comprised of care practitioners, researchers and activists, CareVisions' ethical statement recognises that adopting this approach requires a focus on ‘a dialogic and narrative form of practice' (Barnes et al. 2015b:238).This paper focuses on the process of conceptualising, operationalising and illustrating a feminist ethics of care from the early stages of the project’s development and in approaching its empirical studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Care
• feminist ethics of care
• COVID-19

Introduction

The aim of this paper is to interrogate the process of conceptualising, operationalising and illustrating the enactment of a feminist ethics of care approach in developing and implementing the CareVisions¹ project. It shows how we operationalised feminist ethics of care values throughout the project. In contrast to a political order which prioritises independent, often competing, individuals, the feminist ethics of care reframes our conception of humans as interdependent, reasserting relationality and reciprocity as central to human life and to real world caring (Rummery 2011; Kittay 2020). We detail the processes undertaken to ensure mutuality within the project construction as well as mechanisms developed that support their enactment. We first provide an overview of the project, next we synthesise the feminist ethics of care principles which underpin it, then we outline how these principles informed the research philosophy and design at all stages. The project’s empirical work while focusing on two distinct groups of participants – disabled people and asylum seekers – has the potential to resonate beyond the two groups’ specific contexts.

CareVisions’ empirical phase, which prioritised participatory and creative methods, commenced in Spring 2022. Fieldwork includes participatory research approaches, methods and spaces for deliberation which engage diverse groups and voices in sharing experiences and re-imagining care in Ireland. It recognises the varied contexts and intersectional inequities that shape participants’ lives, as well as the different ways in which participants may wish to be involved in the project. Fieldwork is focused on two streams that aim to understand care dynamics as played out for people made particularly vulnerable during the first waves of COVID-19 in Ireland. One stream focuses on experiences of disabled people and the other stream on asylum seekers in Ireland’s international protection system. The complexities of care relations within both groups raise important issues that problematise traditional binaries that create and strengthen hierarchical barriers that divide and stigmatise those giving and receiving care.

Carevisions’ research philosophy

CareVisions (2020–2023) is a research project that draws on and seeks to develop a feminist ethics of care approach in order to re-imagine future care relations, practices and policies in Ireland and internationally. It does this by exploring experiences of care and care relations during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic in Ireland. Its overall aim is to explore moral and ethical questions about the future of care, by developing an empirical ethics of care in the Irish context, which both advances feminist ethics of care scholarship and informs future policy debates and development. As has occurred in many societies, the COVID-19 pandemic brought into sharp focus significant deficits and inequalities in current care practices and policies in Ireland and raised important questions about how we think about and conceptualise care.

The project was established by an interdisciplinary team of academics and researchers within University College Cork’s (UCC) Institute for Social Science in the twenty-first Century (ISS21)² with diverse research, policy and activist experiences in the care arena. It is funded by the Carolan Trust and the philanthropic generosity of the late Professor Geraldine Fennell, a passionate advocate for care research and policy development. Its focus on care and care relations sought to honour and fulfil the wish of Professor Fennell, to research and improve care in society. CareVisions builds on scholarship undertaken within ISS21’s Caring Research Working Group and CARE21 Research Cluster. It engages across the university and beyond with scholars, policymakers and community and voluntary sector organisations that are advancing knowledge and public debates concerning care. A range of disciplines and experiences are represented within the research team from feminist and asylum seekers rights activism to disability studies, migrant studies, management, global health, sociology and development and other fields. From the outset, in line with feminist care ethics’ notions of responsibility, shared responsibility between co-researchers was prioritised.

Drawing on a literature review undertaken at the commencement of the project, we identified key theoretical concepts which inform CareVisions’ approaches and practices: interdependence, relationality, emphasis on practice and recognising care as political. We recognise that ‘care’ encompasses ‘the political, social, material, and emotional conditions that allow for the vast majority of people and living creatures on this planet to thrive’ (Chatzidakis et al. 2020b, 893) and are inspired by a vision of ‘universal care’ which implies that ‘we are all jointly responsible for hands-on care work, as well as engaging with and caring about the flourishing of other people and the planet’ (Chatzidakis et al. 2020a, 96). However, from the outset also we were cognisant that care ethics perspectives have been strongly critiqued, particularly by activists working from a social model of disability who reject care in favour of rights-based calls for support, choice and independence as a basis for citizenship (Fine and Glendinning 2005; Hughes et al. 2005; McLaughlin 2020).

Interdependence and disrupting the cared-for/carer binary

All of us are ‘some mother’s child’ (Kittay 2020, 71), human interdependence dates from birth, when we relied on others completely, and continues throughout our lives (Held 2006), such that all humans have an ongoing and universal need for care (Barnes 2012). Through feminist care ethics, human interdependence is illuminated, vulnerabilities acknowledged, the dual and interchangeable positions of care giver and receiver are recognised and the need for resources and supports to provide and support care and care relations are made manifest (Lynch, Kalaitzake, and Crean 2021; Tronto 2017).

Understanding care through the prism of interdependence shatters the ‘sense of “us” and “them” … between care givers and the “dependent”’ (Kröger 2009, 416) and emphasis is placed on the ‘nested nature of mutual care relationships’ (Ward 2015, 167). It is recognised how those who receive care also provide care to others and that those who provide care are themselves nested within interdependencies inherent in maintaining care work (Kittay 2020; Lynch, Lyons, and Cantillon 2009). In this ‘everyday reality’ all people need to ‘negotiate caring needs, responsibilities, caregiving, and care-receiving in many directions at once’ (Tronto 2015, 35).

Relational research practice

Relationality, a central premise of the feminist ethic of care, informs the conduct of participatory approaches to co-creation of knowledge about care. Relations between people are central, as are evaluating those relations in order to demonstrate their value (Held 2006). Furthermore, Held (2007) asserts that care ethics need to emerge from our private relations into social and political thought and organisations. Kittay (2020, 42) argues that relationality can inform care policy and practice supporting ‘dependency relationships, in the narrowest sense, and grant its participants full citizenship, then relationships of dependency in the extended sense will be included in a much more natural way’. Contributing knowledge about experiences and practical implications of care relations necessitates ‘a dialogic and narrative form of practice’ (Barnes et al. 2015b, 238). Such an approach has the potential to infuse policy discourse with the experiences of those involved in caring relations and the realities of these relations in a way that does not prioritise one perspective over another (Barnes et al. 2015b). It supports the recognition of care as a multi-directional process and emphasises care as practice revealing the gendered, classed and racialised inequalities within care provision as well as the power relations embedded in care.

Politically oriented research to create social change

Feminist care ethics’ focus on the political, institutional, as well as the personal, hands-on, significance of care, sets it apart (Barnes et al. 2015a) and ‘demands a response from public services to enable social justice’ (Barnes 2012, 59). Reflecting intersectional and disability perspectives, which have refocused care ethics towards care receivers and rights holders (Barnes et al. 2015a), and through examination of the operation of power embedded in welfare systems and care policies, care inequalities, including of gender, race and migration are interrogated. As such, the feminist ethics of care necessitates a political orientation in research practice.

As a critical and political ethic, it provides a politicised conception of care to research of care systems and analysis of the practices needed to produce good care (Tronto 2013; Keller and Kittay 2017). Care ethics underlines how current economic and political systems destabilise people’s equitable participation in care (Tronto 1993, 2013; Held 2006; Lynch 2022). By limiting care concerns to the private and familial sphere, of notice only to those who are ‘dependent’ and their carers (Tronto 1993; Sevenhuijsen 2003, 2004), current political lines ‘are drawn such that the concerns and activities of the relatively powerless are omitted from the central concerns of society’ (Tronto 1993, 20). As a political venture, a dual crisis we inhabit is uncovered – the crisis of care, in the dearth of care available, and the crisis of democracy, in which care is disregarded in political debates and decision-making (Ward, Ray, and Tanner 2020). To overcome this disparagement of care, feminist care ethicists call for care to be placed at the centre of political life and made a key responsibility of the State (Sevenhuijsen 1998; Tronto 1993, 2013). Applying a participatory research framework informed by identified elements of good care (Tronto 1993) – attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness and trust – has the potential to encourage recognition, sharing and validating various types of expertise about care (Ward and Gahagan 2010). Such an approach provides a way to practice research and contribute to enabling ‘responsive policy making’ (Ward and Gahagan 2010, 216) which engages and empowers those who may benefit most from new insights into care.

Carevisions’ internal processes and research design

The internal workings and arrangements of CareVisions attempt to lay foundations of working through centring care as a value and as a practice. It involves a level of reflexivity throughout the mechanisms of the project. Internalising care as a value mandated us to pay particular attention to the values of mutuality, relationality, reciprocity, trust, solidarity and understanding within our internal relations and processes.

Values and planning

Once the team was assembled, a key step in the process was to ensure that all team members were familiar with key concepts and debates developed through the literature. Core readings pertaining to the evolution of feminist ethics of care perspectives, including authors such as Nell Noddings, Virginia Held, Eva Feder Kittay, Kathleen Lynch, Fiona Robinson, Joan Tronto, Selma Sevenjuijsen and others, were identified so that all team members could familiarise themselves with and/or deepen their knowledge of key texts. Thereafter, team members immersed themselves in this material which was then discussed at length at initial team meetings. Following this, the two researchers conducted a literature review to help ground the project in key concepts of the feminist ethics of care emerging from psychology, philosophy, political science, international relations as well as inform us of contestations arising, including from disability rights and intersectional perspectives. This process provided the bedrock for the core values of the project and the research team which had to be acknowledged, problematised and internalised within the team. Furthermore, further competence in facilitation, coaching, participatory and creative methods, was pursued by some team members e.g. through training, workshop attendance, participation in public patient involvement, summer schools as well as skills acquired through an MSc in Life Coaching, all of which informed the project. At an early stage of our work, and in application of concepts identified through this immersion, the research team explored how care has been represented and constructed in political and public debate during the pandemic through discourse analysis of the Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality (2020–2021) and Trace (Sevenhuijsen, 2004; Daly and Edwards 2022) analysis of the Houses of Oireachtas (Irish Parliament) Special Committee on COVID-19 Response (2020).

Advisory group

To support us in ensuring CareVisions’ work is embedded in and guided by the concerns, insights, and experiences of a diversity of groups, we identified advisors with insights into the care crisis revealed by COVID-19. Individual scholars, activists, and practitioners from academia and community groups were invited to participate in the CareVisions Advisory Group. The diverse range of experience reflected in the current advisory group membership spans carers’ and migrant rights’ organisations, disabled people's rights and feminist activists, those with expertise in social policy, philosophy, and sociology, along with other perspectives. Members’ positionality encompass lived experiences as well as activist/academic roles.

Materials developed to facilitate advisory group involvement and knowledge of the project included information about the CareVisions project and the proposed remit of the Advisory Group. This included expectations in terms of involvement, considerations about their input in shaping the project, as well as the time and resources they might expect to allocate to it. Individuals from the Advisory Group who are embedded in activism and services for disabled people and asylum seekers have been more involved in facilitating access to potential research participants and helping to shape the development of the empirical phase of our work. Methodological approaches to empirical work are also informed through the experience and expertise of these and other Advisory Group members. Members of the Advisory Group are considered part of the CareVisions team and are featured on our project website as key contributors to the project.

Ethical statement

As researchers based in a university, we recognise that we are bound by formal ethics procedures as set down by UCC’s Social Research Ethics Committee.³ Through this process, we are committed to principles of informed consent, to minimising harms to research participants, respecting participants’ privacy, and developing inclusive research practices. However, we recognise that ethics is broader than the formal processes of university ethics approval, and that it requires constant reflection about how we are attentive in carrying out research as well as the relationships we form within and across the project: with participants, advisors to the project and other stakeholders. The Advisory Group encouraged and supported the public articulation and dissemination of our vision of a practice of care as well as guiding our approaches to empirical research, through developing an ethical statement.⁴ This sets out our intention to develop research practices and relationships in the CareVisions project based on a feminist ethics of care perspective. We agreed this ethical statement would shape ‘how we work on the project, from the decisions we make about the design of methodologies, through to how we interact and engage with individuals and groups on the research journey’ (The CareVisions Research Team and Research Advisory Group 2021). The statement further centres the project's underlying philosophy, as articulated above: it delineates interrelated understandings of care – that care relations are interdependent; care is personal, political and central to sustaining societies and human and planetary life, and it emphasises collaboration and support; all of which guide our thinking and practice.

Regular team meetings, including in-person when this became possible after COVID-19 restrictions were lifted, were convened from the outset to ensure good and regular levels of communication, joint development of activities and discussion of approaches, as we began to work through the practicalities of researching in ways that reflect ethics of care perspectives. The project PI met individually with the fulltime postdoctoral researchers to identify pathways relevant to their research interests and support their professional development goals. Within the project, we recognise that the precarity of employment within higher education institutions can shape individualistic approaches to career paths which may reward the assertion of neoliberal values more than the enactment of care values (Ivancheva, Lynch, and Keating 2019; Ward 2022). This alerts us to potential tensions embedded within the project’s aims and directions associated with its structural positioning within the academy. Recognising and problematising these tensions are themselves steps in identifying ways and means to work through and develop pathways to overcome them.

Dissemination and advocacy

To highlight the importance of care in society, and as part of our commitment to solidarity and envisioning care as political, we committed to hosting seminars with Irish and international speakers on a regular basis as a way of promoting academic, policy and public conversation and participation in debates about care issues in Irish society and beyond. The project aspires to conclude with public engagement and knowledge transfer activities to promote a shared understanding of ‘good care’ and how it can to re-imagined throughout Irish society. As part of our political and advocacy role, throughout the project we prioritise ongoing and transparent communication via our website, social media and other means.

Developing empirical research

Consultations with the CareVisions advisory group, community-based organisations, and respective community members resulted in the construction of empirical methods that facilitate participant-led research, and which offer multiple avenues of contribution to accommodate participant engagement, in order to capture findings that speak to the realities of lived experiences of care in the challenging context of the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. We coalesced on two priority groups in society for our studies: disabled people and asylum seekers in the international protection system in Ireland. Disabled people were chosen because the concept and practice of care has historically been problematic amongst this group and infused with a carer/care recipient binary, and we sought to re-imagine and differentiate care relations from this historic perspective. Residents in the Direct Provision system were chosen because as international protection applicants, their experiences highlight care deficits within a State protection system that are not often considered in care discourses. Both groups offer insight into experiences of being in receipt of and providers of care, thus collapsing the care giver-care receiver binary.

Research informed by ethics of care values prioritises longer-term responsive partnerships with communities (Brannelly 2018). Three of the research team had long standing relationships with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working with these groups: specifically, Cork Migrant Centre and the Movement for Asylum Seekers Ireland (MASI) which support the wellbeing and social integration of asylum seekers and a national organisation working for disabled people’s rights and led by disabled people. We met with representatives of these organisations and with members of both groups to discuss and identify specific research directions, contexts and materials. Brannelly (2018) also highlights that such relationships need to be responsive of the needs of such communities. The project therefore maintains and fosters ongoing relationships, centred on impacting political and policy change impacting both these groups in society.

A feminist ethics of care perspective means paying attention to the need to create deliberative and participative spaces to enable debates about care to take place in a way which includes a wide and diverse range of voices, from care receivers, to care givers, and those involved in the spheres of policy and service provision, to share experiences and to re-imagine care and care relations in Ireland. Caring for participants necessitates that we are cognisant of the power imbalances in research relationships and endeavour to build relationships based on trust, respect, and mutuality to eliminate the positions of relative power researchers may be perceived as having (Brannelly 2018).

We sought to recognise and accommodate the challenges to research participation and relationships that diverse groups experienced to be as inclusive, credible, and approachable as possible. Concerted effort is required to overcome barriers that people who receive care have often faced in participating in research to engender the co-creation of knowledge ‘produced from lived experience [which] can make sense of theoretical concepts and consider their relevance to ‘every-day life’ (Ward, Ray, and Tanner 2020, 220). In line with institutional ethical approval, we sought to provide accessible information in different formats (e.g. mp3) to enable groups and individuals to make informed decisions about their involvement and drew on a wide range of creative participatory approaches including photovoice and walking interviews. However, in practice we found that participants, sometimes with language and literacy challenges, could be overwhelmed by the detail provided. To overcome this research obstacle, following institutional approval, we had to revise the way we communicated participant information, providing it at incremental stages to participants as the research progressed. This involves a delicate balance to ensure that consent is informed, and the participants are not overburdened by their participation in the research.

We also needed to recognise the potential harm and emotional impact sharing experiences may have on participants. For example, some asylum seekers were wary of institutional data gathering and had fears about the repercussions of sharing experiences which they perceived might influence the asylum-seeking process. We sought to use inclusive language throughout the project (e.g. we used plain English certification) and acknowledged the tensions that can exist around the language and practices of care as it has traditionally been instituted and conceptualised. This was particularly pertinent for disabled people for whom the word care was a loaded term, with many negative connotations.

Building relational research practice with disabled people

CareVisions’ engagement with disabled people recognises the ongoing epistemic and political contestations that frame ‘care’ within the arena of disability as well as critiques of processes and social relations of research production in the arena of disability. These highlight the ways in which potentially exploitative research relationships between (able-bodied) researchers and disabled people as research ‘subjects’ have done little to improve the lives of disabled people (Oliver 1992). Whilst cognisant of these critiques, we recognise the need to create ‘a ‘discourses bridge’ between feminist and disability perspectives on care’ (Hughes et al. 2005, 271; McLaughlin 2020). This is particularly pertinent in terms of highlighting the importance of interdependence and relationality in enabling disabled people to lead self-directed lives – that is, the multiple networks of personal and community relationships or ‘nested dependencies’ (Kittay 2020) that enable us to live as human beings – and reasserting the need for state and societal responsibility to provide appropriate supports at a time of welfare restraint and potential neoliberal capture of the independent living agenda (Hughes et al. 2005; McLaughlin 2020).

In taking a relational approach to the research design and process, our starting point was a desire to explore how disabled people gave meaning to, and experienced, care in their everyday lives, to examine the networks and relations that scaffold these care experiences, and to look at ways at which care practices and policies might be re-envisioned given the systematic failures and inequalities illuminated by COVID-19. We did not begin with a prescriptive research design, but rather engaged in an iterative process and series of conversations with a number of disabled people and disability organisations. This began with a discussion with a member of the project advisory group who is a disabled woman, activist, and manager in a disability advocacy service. From there, we also met with a disabled women’s group of a national women’s organisation and a national independent living organisation which describes itself as collectively working for the rights of disabled people.

These initial conversations yielded a number of important insights in terms of designing the research process and methods: that disabled people wanted to talk about and acknowledge that they were both care givers and receivers; that while COVID-19 had thrown up significant challenges, it has also yielded new types of collectivism; and that there are multiple tensions or ‘care conflicts’ in terms of balancing provision of ‘good’ care for disabled people with valuing care work and workers. It was also apparent that disabled people had multiple and very varied ideas about how to enact change in the area of care. Through these discussions it was evident that we needed a research design that was flexible, accessible and attuned to the significant demands, and sometimes restrictions, that participants had on their time. Despite the lifting of lockdown restrictions, for example, many disabled people stated that they would prefer the online space as a platform for engaging in the research.

Having reflected on these conversations and subsequent discussions amongst the research team, we proposed a research process with multiple interrelated methods and strands with which participants could choose to engage. At its heart is a focus group process made up of a group of ten disabled people who are all members of the independent living political collective and/or disabled women’s group, and who met five times online across the period of the project. This is complemented by individual semi-structured interviews with the same participants (some face-to-face and some online), written or audio diary recordings, and photographs taken by participants which help illuminate understandings and experiences of care. The group process is an emergent one, in which each discussion informs the next: it brings people together to collectively discuss different aspects of care experiences, but also to reflect on findings as they emerge from the other strands of the research project and identify specific research outputs and spaces where the research can feed into wider societal and political debates in Ireland about future care relations.

This collective engagement is an important dynamic of the research process drawing on care as political and directed at change of the current ordering of care relations (Kittay 2020; Tronto, 2103; Lanoix 2020). Examining specific struggles to give and receive care has the potential to contest the devaluing and marketisation of care in neoliberal societies (Ward, Ray, and Tanner 2020) and interrogate spaces for policy and political change. The individuals involved see themselves as engaged in political activism to further the rights of disabled people in Ireland, particularly in terms of independent living. While most participants have physical and/or sensory impairments, they reflect a range of genders, ages, living arrangements, and care identities and experiences. Challenging binary divisions, many participants come to the project also as parents, siblings, friends, neighbours and activists, reflecting their multiple positioning within dynamics of care relations.

Our experience so far is that building a form of relational research practice takes time and requires significant building of trust given the often intensely personal, and sometimes painful, nature of participants’ care experiences (Ward and Gahagan 2010). The existing familiarity between participants (many know each other already from their engagement in the disability movement and in independent living activism) and which has developed between the researchers and participants supports a depth of engagement to discuss the complexity of care for disabled people, to develop some shared understandings and to challenge each other’s conceptions of care. However, our discussions continue to be shaped by the thorny tension between care and justice, and the ‘conceptually contaminated’ (Kröger 2009, 399) nature of the care concept for some of our participants. Aware of these political and linguistic sensitivities, we are seeking to discuss care while also adhering to some participants’ preference for terms such as ‘assistance’, ‘support’ or ‘help’. However, we also recognise feminist disability scholars’ calls for ambivalence as helpful in this context; that is, it is sometimes necessary to leave certain care debates and contested terms unresolved (Kelly 2013), whilst not abandoning the task of building bridges which consider how society can value care in ways which are meaningful to, and support, disabled people’s calls for citizenship.

Participatory and participant led methods with Asylum Seekers.

Our intention in this element of the research is to contribute knowledge about the experiences of asylum seekers to interrogate the ‘care’ they receive from the State and make the care they give more visible. The Irish State system for international protection accommodation, known as Direct Provision and Dispersal (DP), is an institutional setting which asserts control over people and the physical space they live within. It was introduced in 2000 following a rise in numbers of people coming to Ireland seeking international protection throughout the 1990s and a pilot scheme in 1999. It comprises shared hostel type accommodation with small weekly financial allowances. There are specific house rules applied locally in centres to which residents must comply. They include, for instance, rules on visitors – when and where they can visit – as well as rules on what can be stored in rooms and rules on eating/cooking times. Since its introduction it has been widely and consistently critiqued as limiting people’s freedom to integrate and as causing further trauma⁵ The Oireachtas Special Committee on COVID Response⁶ has recognised that congregated accommodation for asylum seekers placed them at increased risk of COVID-19 infection and had several care shortcomings (Houses of the Oireachtas 2020). Furthermore, O’Riordan has drawn on feminist of ethics of care principles to suggest that the State can be seen as ‘having a public and care responsibility in developing supports for vulnerable populations, and in being politically accountable for its national and international care responsibilities’ (O’Riordan 2020, 4).

From the outset, we sought the input of asylum seekers to inform themes and approaches for our study. We recognised the potential challenges for participants’ engagement given that asylum seekers have previously been identified as a ‘hard to reach’ research population (Foreman and Ní Raghallaigh 2020). We recognised that participants might wish to be involved in different ways due to a diversity of barriers and that they may require material support to enable their involvement. With guidance from an Advisory Group member who is the Programme Coordinator at the Cork Migrant Centre, we convened a series of preliminary focus group discussions to explore potential themes and methodological approaches. This provided an opportunity to be guided by individuals living in Direct Provision to consider what they might want to reveal about their multiple care relations: paid carer; unpaid family carer; childcare; living ‘under the care’ of the State; care for others living in Direct Provision; limits to self-care.

Our Advisory Group member identified six women working in the care sector and living in Direct Provision and we held three, hour-long online exploratory meetings at various times. It was of utmost importance to remain flexible to accommodate their schedules as they balanced work, including night shifts, some very complex and time-consuming travel arrangements, childcare and self-care. Within these preparatory discussions we reviewed themes that we might explore in our study, related to their experiences in care work and their lives in Direct Provision. Participants emphasised conundrums faced while living in Direct Provision during COVID-19 lockdown and working in health and social care settings responding to pandemic. Concerned about adding to existing time pressures, we discussed methods for self-directed research through creative methods, such as photovoice, as well as traditional interviews and walking interviews. Many of these women seemed to relish having an outlet to relay some of their most difficult situations at work and within the spaces of Direct Provision and some expressed a desire to ‘make some noise’ with the research.

Another set of discussions involved potential participants advising us about their interest in exploring care themes emerging from living in Direct Provision centres during COVID-19 lockdown. The interest in giving voice to this arose from analysis of the Oireachtas Special Committee on COVID-19 Response. Noting the contribution that care workers living in Direct Provision made on the front lines of the COVID-19 response the Special Committee identified significant risks within these congregated setting and lamented that outbreaks occurred following transfers between Direct Provision centres. In order to identify potential participants, we also contacted the Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland (MASI), a collective that gives voice to issues facing asylum seekers in Ireland.⁷ They assisted with identification of individuals who had been caught up in transfers and/or residing in Direct Provision centres during lockdown and subsequently held two meetings with such individuals to discuss their interest in participating in this strand of research. Participants were keen to provide personal testimony about the precarious situations they faced in Direct Provision and indicated that online interviews would be acceptable to them.

Another strand of our study emerged from the establishment of a community garden in Cork city in partnership with Cork Migrant Centre. We identified that this could be provide an opportunity to explore care for people and planet inspired by a vision of ‘universal care’ (Chatzidakis et al. 2020b). We were also aware of another community garden that has been operating for several years outside a Direct Provision centre in the rural town of Clonakilty in County Cork and contacted representatives of this initiative with a view to ascertaining their interest in sharing their views. We held a preliminary exploratory meeting at the garden in Clonakilty attended by five women living in Direct Provision, three of whom work in health and social care. This was an invaluable chance to discuss our study face-to-face with potential research participants. They expressed an interest in being interviewed either about their paid care work or about how the community garden supports connections with nature and facilitates integration with community members in the town.

Following ethical approval, we began recruiting participants through Cork Migrant Centre, MASI and Clonakilty Friends of Asylum Seekers. Our inclusion criteria were people aged over 18, living in, or having previous experience of living in, Direct Provision, and able to understand and consent to participate in the research. While we have aimed to recruit men and women, our sample is mostly comprised of women given that care work is dominated by women workers. As mentioned, we had proposed the photovoice method for participants to have a self-directed way take photographs of objects/places that have meaning for them in terms of care and to contribute an audio or written piece about the photographs before undertaking an interview with a member of the research team. Reflecting as a team and with participants on what is and isn't working, we found that our intention for participants to utilise photovoice as a self-directed method was not actually making engagement easy for care workers. We realised several limitations: orientation to the method was time consuming, the concept for photograph subjects about care was too vague for participants and utilisation of the technical interface to store photos and voice/text entries added a further layer of complexity. Challenges in using photovoice with migrant communities are discussed by Hauber-Özer and Call-Cummings (2020). As our discussions with participants continued it emerged that participants were wary of this method, fearing it might intersect negatively with their protection applications. As a result, we deprioritized this method.

While findings of the empirical work are outside the scope of this paper, the scheduling of the research coincided with increased numbers of people coming to Ireland seeking international protection, particularly people fleeing war in Ukraine. The Irish State’s compliance with EU measures to accommodate and facilitate the employment and integration of those arriving from Ukraine outpaces entitlements the State provides for those seeking international protection. This has accentuated existing tensions regarding the duty of care of the Irish State for those who have been confined to Direct Provision for some time. Reflexivity in our methodological approach to semi-structured interviews facilitated discussion of these emerging issues.

Conclusion

CareVisions’ focus on re-envisioning care has implications for our internal and external processes, as well as the activities and nature of the project. The conceptual foundations drawn from the feminist ethics of care influenced and directed the project, guiding the way towards the practice and values embedded within it. Emphasising care as relational and embedded in interdependency necessarily intersects with the project’s internal relations and processes, as well as influencing and informing empirical work. Associated normalised structures, assumptions and divisions reveal care’s political nature, emanating from personal lived experiences but with much to speak to wider societal concerns.

Emphasis on deepening our understanding through reading, discussing and reviewing materials forefronts a process-driven approach while also paving pathways to practical application of the project’s conceptual foundations. An extensive review of the literature, developed by the full-time researchers, informed and consolidated understanding and influenced subsequent focus for the empirical work of the project. It also facilitated further immersion in the feminist ethics of care which was central to building solid foundations for the work. While not necessarily articulated as such at its inception, the time and process taken to ensure this engagement, speaks to supporting the development of our team’s understanding and questioning of materials within an area of scholarship that is still in theoretical development. The foundations of the project, thus, enabled a discussive and participatory approach to empirical research with specific groups experiencing very different care contexts. Empirical work also drew on expertise and relations already established within the research team and Advisory Group. Notwithstanding this, the identification of research avenues arose through significant shortcomings identified within these care contexts through COVID-19 lockdown restrictions. Empirical findings, while concentrated on the participating groups will have resonance beyond their corridors of care.

Attention to articulating the project’s values through development of an ethical statement guides and articulates practical application across the project. Reflexivity, embedded into our processes facilitates the articulation of the work as praxis, enabling the identification and articulation of potential tensions across the scope of the project. At a mid-point of the project’s duration, several processes and tensions in application of feminist care ethics are identified. While not providing definitive solutions, these ways of working have the potential to challenge less care-informed practices as well as articulate the dilemmas and contradictions encountered by those whose care needs are not adequately recognised and who experience significant care deficits.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Carolan Trust.

Notes on contributors

Jacqui O’Riordan

Jacqui O’Riordan is a lecturer at the School of Applied Social Studies, University College Cork, Ireland, where she works across a broad range of undergraduate, postgraduate and adult education programmes. Her research interests are largely located in qualitative participatory methodologies developed in co-operation with community participants and stakeholders. Research contributions in the care field include analysis of care and experiences of carers. She has worked with civil society organisations in researching experiences of carers, and less visible aspects and caring contexts such as supporting mental wellbeing in family and caring across home and institutions. She has also developed postgraduate seminars to further conceptual understanding of caring relations and dynamics. More broadly her work centres on a range of issues concerning gender, equality and diversity in local and global contexts. It includes analyses of aspects of women’s livelihoods; conditions experienced by a range of marginalised communities; child trafficking; care for children; migrant children’s experiences and interactions in education; community supports for people, younger and older, living with disabilities.

Felicity Daly

Felicity Daly is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences in the twenty-first Century working on the CareVisions project. Felicity holds a Doctor of Public Health (Dr PH) from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Her doctoral thesis examined the participation of health policy stakeholders, particularly civil society actors concerned with the sexual health of women who have sex with women, in the development of South Africa’s National Strategic Plans on HIV. She conducted her thesis as a Research Associate at the Health Economics and HIV Research Division of the University of KwaZulu Natal, Durban, South Africa. Prior to joining UCC Felicity was a researcher at the Institute for Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. Felicity co-created a mixed-methods research agenda within an international development project funded by the UK government to improve socio-economic inclusion among sexual minority populations in five sub-Saharan African cities. In addition to her work as a researcher Felicity has over two decades professional experience in the fields of global health and social development. She has worked extensively as an independent consultant providing policy analysis, programme evaluation and technical advice to UN agencies and non-governmental organisations

Cliona Loughnane

Cliona Loughnane is a postdoctoral researcher on the 3-year CareVisions project in the Institute of Social Science in the twenty-first Century, University College Cork (UCC). Previously, Cliona worked for more than 15 years in research and policy positions in NGOs and the health service. Most recently, she worked as women’s health coordinator for Ireland’s leading women’s organisation, working to achieve women’s reproductive rights and access to healthcare. Cliona was a member of the Government’s Women’s Health Taskforce, co-chair of the Women’s Mental Health Network, and with NGO and academic colleagues established the Health Reform Alliance. Throughout her career, Cliona has been active social researcher, leading and involved in a wide-range of projects, including on women’s mental health, healthcare reform, the role of social justice advocacy in policymaking, and women’s experiences of caring during COVID-19. Cliona undertook her Doctorate, a critical discourse analysis problematising Big Food’s involvement in obesity policymaking, at the School of Applied Social Studies, UCC. Her research interests include feminist methodologies, citizen involvement in health reform and corporate influences on public policymaking.

Carol Kelleher

Carol Kelleher is a lecturer in service design at management at University College Cork (UCC). She co-founded and co-chairs the Institute of Social Science in the twenty-first Century (ISS21) CARE21 research cluster in UCC. She is committed to participatory action research approaches which place carers’ voices and experiences at the centre of policy and practice. Carol is Principal Investigator of the PPI Ignite Network in UCC, which aims to build capacity for high quality PPI in UCC and amongst wider society. She is also the recipient of three Irish Research Council New Foundations research awards which focussed on supporting Young Carers, Former Carers and promoting PPI research with family carers. Her research on caregiving has appeared in the Journal of Service Research, Journal of Business Research and Marketing Theory, amongst others.

Claire Edwards

Claire Edwards in Lecturer in Social Policy in the School of Applied SocialStudies/Institute for Social Science in the twenty-first Century, University College Cork. Her research and teaching is primarily concerned with geographical and sociological understandings of disability and the dynamics of socio-spatial in/justice in disabled people’s everyday lives. She has published widely on this in a range of journals including Health and Place, Critical Social Policy, Sociology, Social and Cultural Geography, Urban Studies, Social Science and Medicine and BioSocieties.

Notes

1 https://www.carevisionsucc.ie/

2 https://www.ucc.ie/en/iss21/

3 https://www.ucc.ie/en/research/support/ethics/socialresearch/

4 link to CareVisions' Ethical Statement https://static1.squarespace.com/static/60794fe9b05e0b4b67aebfc7/t/6241c666f1d2c87853dd8d68/1648477799693/CareVisions+Ethical+Statement+.pdf

5 The critiques of Direct Provision and Dispersal are many and include those of academics, advocacy organisations and legal sources.

6 This committee was set up by the Dáil (the Irish parliament) to consider and take evidence on Ireland’s response to COVID-19. It operated from May to October 2020.

7 Information on MASI can be found here: https://www.masi.ie/