A Perspetiva do Cuidado – Rumo a uma Epistemologia Feminista do Trabalho

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Perceiving Care Situated Knowledge, Feminist Standpoints, and Consciousness-Raising

Publication . Lobo, Camila Ribeirinha Cardoso de Lima; Venturinha, Nuno Carlos da Silva Carvalho Costa; Crary, Alice Marguerite

The central object of this dissertation is the concept of care, and its main argument is the claim that certain aspects of the world only come into view from the vantage point of subjects engaged in practices of care. The claim is defended with respect to two general conceptions of care: care as a laboring activity and care as a mode of perception. While analytically distinct, these two understandings of care are intimately related in both theory and practice. On the one hand, socially devalued care labor often requires the exercise of capacities that largely exceed strictly cognitivist models of rationality in attending to ordinary forms of vulnerability. On the other hand, these caring modes of perception are themselves largely neglected by dominant philosophical models in favor of neutral conceptions of rationality and abstract notions of objectivity. This shared history of exclusions has long been identified by critical theorists committed to revealing how dominant ideologies are expressed in traditional epistemological projects that contribute to the reproduction of social hierarchies. The dissertation proceeds by drawing selectively upon a range of traditiondefiant authors who variously argue that achieving more objective accounts of social reality demands an appreciation of caring modes of response to the world. This emphasis on achievement speaks for a methodology that simultaneously challenges the authority of neutrality as an epistemic value and recognizes the need to engage critically with subjective experience. Such methodology is uniquely expressed by standpoint theory’s distinction between the notions of “perspective” and “standpoint”, which provides the structure of the present text. Hence, the dissertation is divided into two parts that generally trace the development of perspectives of care into standpoints of care. The first part, “The Perspective of Care”, deals with different accounts of situated knowledge to argue that the systematically marginalized social positions of caregivers afford them a unique perspective from which to access certain aspects of the world,while simultaneously preventing them from developing resources to communicate and understand the normative significance of their experiences. The second part, “The Standpoint of Care”, articulates the need to mobilize such perspectival advantages into the collective development of reflective standpoints that critically illuminate social reality, creating the conditions for liberatory visions of the social organization of care to emerge. The structure of the text is meant to suggest its embodiment of consciousnessraising as a methodology for transforming situated perspectives into reflective standpoints. This transformation cannot be conceived as a purely cumulative process that leads to the achievement of a final state in the knowledge production process. Instead, standpoints must be understood as ongoing projects that can be critically assessed against changing material conditions and ever-emerging situated perspectives. By adopting care perspectives as their starting point, these projects do not merely seek to acquire more knowledge about social reality, but to cultivate ways of seeing that lead to new, genuine forms of political recognition. I conclude that the recognition of historically marginalized practices such as care labor ultimately requires the cultivation of modes of perception that these activities themselves make available. In other words, perceiving care ultimately demands that we perceive caringly.

2025-07-29Tese de doutoramento

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Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia

Número da atribuição

UI/BD/151014/2021