#26 · Before the Assembly
How to tackle care as a core element of transformations? Which care practices are cultivated in CCAs? How to ensure care-ful environments and services? How do deal with the additional care work that CCAs can produce?
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As Gabriele Winkler highlights in “Care Revolution” (2015), care has transformative potential because it focuses on the interdependencies and shared responsibilities between humans and the “natural” world. In CCAs, care becomes transformative when practiced relationally through deliberative processes. By centering care, dominant deliberative norms, which are often expert-driven, rationalist, and state-controlled, can be challenged.
Care is a “non-normative obligation” that generates additional labour, which often falls on individuals dedicated to care. In CCAs, this includes invisible activities that support communication, relationships, or collective processes. The need to act on the tensions that care labour creates must be acknowledged and managed.
”Care-full” deliberation means encouraging everyone involved in a CCA to give and receive care, and to care for and with others. This includes recognising and creating space for emotional, practice-based, contextual knowledges and everyday relational practices and understandings such as mutual support, conflict resolution, and collective responsibility while considering the material and infrastructural conditions for participation such as the accessibility of locations, transport, catering, and support for caring responsibilities A CCA can be even more transformative if care itself becomes one of the main goals of the CCA process.
In a Care full deliberation, care is a principle a practice and an infrastructure:
During the Irish Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality (2020–21), care work emerged as a focus of participants’ deliberations, shaping both the discussion and the recommendations. The mandated addressed structural care responsibilities, including work‑life balance, early years parental care, and the social responsibility within families, thus placing care firmly on the agenda and linking it to gender equality.
As Gabriele Winkler highlights in “Care Revolution” (2015), care has transformative potential because it focuses on the interdependencies and shared responsibilities between humans and the “natural” world. In CCAs, care becomes transformative when practiced relationally through deliberative processes. By centering care, dominant deliberative norms, which are often expert-driven, rationalist, and state-controlled, can be challenged.
Care is a “non-normative obligation” that generates additional labour, which often falls on individuals dedicated to care. In CCAs, this includes invisible activities that support communication, relationships, or collective processes. The need to act on the tensions that care labour creates must be acknowledged and managed.
”Care-full” deliberation means encouraging everyone involved in a CCA to give and receive care, and to care for and with others. This includes recognising and creating space for emotional, practice-based, contextual knowledges and everyday relational practices and understandings such as mutual support, conflict resolution, and collective responsibility while considering the material and infrastructural conditions for participation such as the accessibility of locations, transport, catering, and support for caring responsibilities A CCA can be even more transformative if care itself becomes one of the main goals of the CCA process.
In a Care full deliberation, care is a principle a practice and an infrastructure:
During the Irish Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality (2020–21), care work emerged as a focus of participants’ deliberations, shaping both the discussion and the recommendations. The mandated addressed structural care responsibilities, including work‑life balance, early years parental care, and the social responsibility within families, thus placing care firmly on the agenda and linking it to gender equality.
“Care Revolution” Gabriele Winker 2015 / care-revolution.org , Heide Lutosch - dissens)
Barnes M (2008). Passionate participation: Emotional experiences and expressions in deliberative forums. Critical Social Policy 28(4): 461–81.
Barnes M (2012). Care in Everyday Life – An Ethic of Care in Practice. Bristol: Policy Press.
Barnes M, Brannelly T, Ward L, et al. (2015). Conclusion: Renewal and transformation – the importance of an ethics of care. In: Barnes M, Brannelly T, Ward L and Ward N (eds) Ethics of Care Critical Advances in International Perspective. Bristol: Policy Press, 233–43.
de La Bellacasa, M. P. (2017). Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds (Vol. 41). U of Minnesota Press.
Loughane, C., Kellehrer, C., Edwards, C. (2023). Care full deliberation? Care work and Ireland’s citizens’ assembly on gender equality. Critical Social Policy, 43(4), 697-717. https://doi.org/10.1177/02610183231169195 (Original work published 2023)
