Editorial: The ethics of care and academic development

Abstract

Higher education institutions have commonly understood ethics and care as separate functions, rather than as an integrated practice, and have tended to delegate these responsibilities to research ethics committees, professional bodies or Human Resource departments as custodians of institutional codes of conduct. The ethics of care (Gilligan 1982; Noddings 1984; Tronto 1993; 2010; 2013) provides an alternative normative framework to such principal ethics or codes of conduct. The current higher education context, both in South Africa, and internationally is in a state of turmoil, having to face many challenges in terms of access, available funding, casualisation of labour, demands to decolonise the curriculum, amongst others. This special issue considers some of these effects of colonisation and neoliberalism on the academy from a political ethics of care perspective.