The World Needs More Care

The special issue “Care & Time” was published in the Journal of Philosophical Investigations of the University of Tabriz in English, with guest editorship by Professor Maurice Hamington (University of Portland, USA) and collaboration with Sarah Munawar, in this Journal in the Volume 19, Issue 51, Summer 2025. Professor Maurice Hamington, a professor of philosophy at the University of Portland, who is a well-known philosopher in the field of ethics of care and is now a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Philosophical Investigations.

Ethics of care is a growing interdisciplinary and international field of study in which researchers around the world explain the issue of care at the individual, collective, social, and even political levels as an act, a virtue, and a collective moral responsibility. This special issue explores and explains the fundamental and philosophical aspect of the relationship between care and time in its broadest sense. Care has spatial and temporal dimensions that distinguish it from other ethical approaches. Care is time-consuming.

The title of this special issue recalls Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, which argues that time is the horizon that gives meaning to all moments of our existence and further develops his concept of Dasein as an existence rooted in care.

Collectively, the authors guide us towards an understanding of time that is not trapped in the capitalist concepts of limitation, profit, and productivity. The time required for adequate care is a crucial issue in today’s capitalist society. The dominant social narrative of neoliberalism emphasizes rapid transactional relationships that in many ways contradict the essence of care. Health professionals are under pressure to spend less time with patients, while caseloads reduce the time that caregivers can devote to clients, and new technologies, along with increasing class sizes, limit the time that teachers can spend with students. Despite these constraints, caregiving continues. The articles also point out that caregiving has an aesthetic, and that engaging with it, like any art form, involves spending time with others—listening, hugging, laughing, and teaching.

In her introduction to the special issue, Hamington says that rather than seeing care as a finite act, these articles invite us to see it as an ongoing journey, a poetic and political act that connects us across time, space, and difference. In doing so, they open up new relationships and worlds rooted in the dream of a just and compassionate world for all.

The list of articles in this special issue, which has been contributed by various authors and experts in the field of ethics of care from five continents, is as follows.

Download link for articles:

https://philosophy.tabrizu.ac.ir/issue_2043_2153.html?lang=en

Contents of this issue:

1. Introduction by Maurice Hamington and Sarah Munawar

2. Seeking a Culturally Relevant Ethic of Care for Mexican/Mexican American Youth: A Revolutionist Ethic of Care and its Wily, Tactical Mechanism of Humor by Mia Angélica Sosa-Provencio

3. Building Sustainability: Crip Time and Disability Justice in the Spanish Medical Industrial Complex by Àger Perez Casanovas

4. With hardship comes ease: Muslim-Feminist Meditations on Miscarriage, Care-Based Knowing, and Lineage by Sarah Munawar

5. Life. Time by Riikka Prattes

6. Is Care Compatible with The Tyranny of Immediacy? On Substituting Rhythm to Cadence by Christine Leroy

7. The Socio-Political Performance of Care: Tanzania Women's Struggle to increase the age of Consent above fourteen years by Agnes Phoebe Muyanga

8. The Multiple Temporalities of State-Building and Care in South Korea by Hee-Kang Kim

9. A Disruptive Ontology of Caring Time: Overcoming Moral Harm in Care through an Emancipatory Ethics of Time by Amrita Banerjee

10 caring Space-Time Travel Through Poetry by Ce Rosenow and Maurice Hamington