Caring Democracy: How Should Concepts Travel?

Abstract

Can the conceptual framework of ‘caring democracy’ be applied beyond the time and place where it first emerged? The chapters in this volume suggest so. Yet several dangers exist. First, such applications may be so remote as to render the concept of ‘caring democracy’ unintelligible. Second, past experience with western discourses, including discourses of care, suggest that they can become justifications for colonial and imperial domination. Many scholars have begun to propose ways in which scholars of care can avoid such dangers, drawing upon frameworks such as dislocation, solidarity, cosmopolitanism, intersectionality, and virtue. This chapter argues, though, the solution needs to arise out of the practices of a political conception of caring democracy itself, most especially, in thinking about and acting to foreground responsibility for more democratic practices in concrete and global frameworks. Some promising directions for doing so are proposed.