Care: An interdisciplinary view on theory, research, policy and practice

By Professor Kirstein Rummery - Associate Director, SGS-DTC

Day 2 of the second week of the SGS Summer School. We’re going to try something a bit different, and take people out of their disciplinary comfort zones….we’re going to try and think about CARE in different ways. Hopefully it’ll be challenging, engaging, critical….The aim of this event was to bring together different disciplines, to gain new perspectives, and to come away with fresh insight in our research. 

We kicked off with a keynote address from Professor Marian Barnes from the University of Brighton, author of several key texts in this area including Care in Everyday Life: an ethic of care in practice. She talked about the challenges of doing CareFull research, of drawing on feminist and other thinkers, of thinking about ourselves and our approaches to care in our research. We then had presentations looking at care research in comparative social policy, from Kirstein Rummery, and using data sets to gain longitudinal perspectives on care from Janice McGhee.

After lunch came the really challenging part: several of us had volunteered ‘works in progress’ to be critically reviewed by senior, experienced researchers. These sessions were run according to Korpi’s rules, which are used by the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee on Poverty and Social Policy. Everyone has read the paper in question, and the author does not present it: instead the discussant presents a summary and a critique of it, you respond, and you then get critical feedback from the other participants. It’s quite different doing this from discussing your work with your supervisor, or even presenting your own work at a conference. People pick up on different things and have challenging perspectives that you might not even have considered – it can feel a bit bruising if it isn’t done ‘with care’!! Luckily the discussions, though challenging, were always thoughtful and supportive. Everyone came away with very useful ways to improve their ideas, research and writing.

The final session was a presentation from Alison Bowes on a project bringing together sociological and economic perspectives on care, which further highlighted the challenges and potential rewards taking an interdisciplinary approach to research on something as complex and contested as ‘care’. We finished with a fascinating discussion about what we can take away and apply to our own work.

Everyone learned a hell of a lot. In fact, the only critique of the day was that the lunch break was too short – there wasn’t time to take everything in! We’ll definitely be running more interdisciplinary training events like this in the future in the Scottish Graduate School: looking at a common theme from different epistemological, theoretical, empirical and disciplinary perspectives really challenges you to be critical of your own stance, and opens up new possibilities for understanding a complex social world. Bring on the next one! And ‘take care’ – of each other!