My hypothesis is that the beginning of the twenty-first century marked the emergence of a ’therapeutic’ way of writing and reading. Literature is viewed as a way of bringing literature and medicine closer together and extending a more general view on literary forms of attention and the ethics of care. With the example of French and Francophone literature, I suggest a relational turn defines the contemporary literature: literature is considered as a relationship – between the author and herself, between the author and her relatives, between the author and her readers, and between the readers themselves. Literature is a means of producing awareness and attention, that is to say, to point out, to make visible, to give importance to people or to situations that society and the economy do not make visible or invisible.

The book concludes on a note of hope. The UK’s legal and non-legal landscape is often fragmented, but nevertheless facilities the efforts of communities of care, who care about cultural heritage, to care for it. This chapter sets the book in the context of being the start of a conversation about care of cultural heritage with a hope to expand the concept more widely in the future.

This chapter defines care in the context of cultural heritage, drawing on the work of Joan Tronto, who treats care as both a disposition and a process. Central to this is the notion that care represents how people care about cultural heritage, but also the action of caring for it. Given the multitude of communities that care about, and care for, cultural heritage, it is clear that care is relational in nature. Building on the work of other academics who have analysed the nature of care, this chapter applies these to the context of cultural heritage and identifies the central elements of care as (a) developing and sustaining relationships; (b) acknowledging and assuming responsibilities; and (c) identifying and maintaining the appropriate care in the circumstances and revisiting this regularly. The need for caution with the concept of care is addressed, in particular to ensure that care is not paternalistic. Any system of care needs to build in space for revisiting the current allocation of care to determine whether it remains appropriate.

A focus on care draws attention to the fact that ethical self-cultivation, even in traditions that foreground moral autonomy, relies upon relationships of dependence. The recognition of relational and ethical dependence is familiar to anthropologists and has long been central for feminist ethics. However, the enormous body of anthropological scholarship that has emerged on care over the last decade raises the question of ethical dependence anew. This chapter problematizes the concept of care. It asks: how might ‘care’ as a topic, and as engaged ethnographically, trouble some of the ways that ethical life more broadly has been conceived in the philosophical and anthropological literature? Conversely, how might attention to the ethical stakes of care trouble some of the rich ethnographic scholarship on care? The chapter draws most substantially on anthropological and philosophical scholarship in virtue ethics and in phenomenology to consider both the relational complexities of care and care’s ineffable and elusive ethical dimensions.

Lawyering in the 21st century is a complex mix of skills, knowledge, experience and ethics. While all these are obviously important for successful practice, it is the ethical zone that ultimately defines reputable lawyers and separates them from those who are merely successful in financial terms. Reputation is an elusive concept and hard to analyse in a short introduction. But one vital element of reputation is the notion of sound ethical judgement – the capacity of a lawyer to understand and choose wisely between contrasting ethical frameworks before making a difficult decision. In this task, it is vital to appreciate that there are several possible approaches to legal ethics. In this chapter, we explore those different approaches and explain why it is frequently appropriate to assess all alternatives for their possible impact.There are four main strands of ethical reasoning or considerations specific to lawyers in the context of Australian legal institutions: adversarial advocacy, responsible lawyering, moral activism and ethics of care. These four types are set out in this book as ideals, and we emphasise what is distinctive about each approach.

The differing roles a lawyer can play in civil dispute resolution require ethical judgement to determine how best to act according to the context in which the lawyer is working. As key actors in this system, lawyers have a paramount duty to the administration of justice. This chapter considers some of the impacts of a lack of care by the lawyer and the need for a fulsome notion of competence in providing legal services in dispute resolution. It then turns to how the law of lawyering attempts to balance or observe lawyers’ obligations to the client and the administration of justice in each case. We go on to consider the possibility for lawyers to go beyond the legal minimum, to take responsibility for a more moral activist approach by engaging in a moral conversation with clients. In the final section, we turn to lawyers’ roles in the administration of justice outside the courts, where they represent clients in alternative and more collaborative or non-adversarial forms of dispute resolution.

This chapter discusses efforts to transcend disagreements between carer and disability rights perspectives in relation to care and support. The tension between these perspectives rests on a dichotomous view of people with disabilities as being either dependent on others and in need of ‘care’ or independent holders of rights. Ethics of care theorists have challenged this dichotomy, arguing that interdependence – both giving and receiving care – must be reconceived as normal and universal human experiences and elements of citizenship. Some disability scholars have engaged with the ethics of care perspective, drawing especially on a human rights perspective on disability, to devise an approach that can recognize and meet care and support needs on the basis of shared dignity rather than shared vulnerability. This would require the introduction of care and support policies that recognize and extend support to people in all forms of care and support relationships, recognize diversity of need, impairment and preference and facilitate the exercise of the full suite of citizenship and human rights. While this approach is promising, some conceptual differences between the carer and disability rights perspectives remain unaddressed, including a persistent tendency to prioritize one side of the care or support relationship over the other.

This chapter introduces a set of six principles to guide the evaluation and design of rights-based care and support policy in liberal welfare states. The principles build on and extend the reconciliation efforts discussed in earlier chapters, using the common thread of social citizenship rights claims that runs through the feminist, carer and disability rights perspectives. The principles provide criteria for evaluating the extent to which existing policies encompass the concerns of multiple care and disability perspectives, including whether they ease policy tensions between supporting women’s unpaid care and paid work and between meeting the claims of carers and those of people with disabilities. The principles can also inform the design of policies that promote equal social citizenship rights to care, support and paid work participation for all parties to these relationships. The principles address matters including access to financial resources and good quality services; flexibility in how life is organized; time for unpaid care, paid work and self-care; incorporation of the ‘voice’ of all affected people in the policy design; and responding to difference associated with gender inequality, disability and impairment, and citizenship status.

Chapter 8 reflects on findings from the preceding chapters, concluding that parental migration profoundly changed children’s relationships with the adults in their families. The children were socialised to see their parents’ migration as generating an intergenerational debt for them to repay through study. Simultaneously, children’s perceptions of their families’ care for them were influenced by (1) a future-oriented striving ethos that valorised youth and cities over elders and rurality, and (2) social constructions of motherhood and fatherhood that shaped ideas about the kinds of care and investment necessary to prepare children for decent urban futures. In drawing on the cultural repertoires that people took for granted, striving struck at the heart of the rural family such that pathways to ‘recognition’ within and beyond the family cohered: failure at school or in the labour market was failure as a child, parent, or spouse. This chapter questions the inevitability of ceaseless multi-local family striving. Children, with their natural emphasis on reciprocity highlight the basic human need for social protection, intimacy, interdependence, affective wellbeing and shared time. China’s-policy makers see further urbanisation as the answer to the problem of left-behind children. But can their development plans ever heed a child-inspired ethic of care?

Chapter 7 locates the ethical dimension of education within the students’ lived experiences in schools. It maintains that ethical education is concerned with providing relevant, intended and continuous direct experiences to enable young people to grow with a sense of respect and empathy for others and to engage, think and act ethically. It considers what changes in educational institutions would be essential in helping students to become more ethically aware, sensitive and motivated. These include engaging in peer and adult relationships characterised by care and reflection; and encounters with ethical issues and the relating topics of justice, fairness and equality. Reflecting on such practices in a variety of educational contexts such as in Ghana, Swaziland and Kenya, this chapter proposes a number of steps and practices towards ethical education in schools, including mapping out relational and ethical spaces in schools, integrating the ethos of building schools as ethical communities, consolidating curriculum activities and so forth. Examples can teach us principles to base our educative practices upon. It concludes that in doing so, students and teachers will not only learn about relationships but more importantly they will learn in relationship.

Chapter 6 considers a conception of the self that is especially conducive, if not essential, to becoming aware of and sensitive to one’s obligation to care for others. It argues that awareness of and sensitivity to the ethical imperative of caring for others requires the confirmation of an enriched version of oneself grounded in a personal sense of moral agency. This sense of agency entails the realisation that, within reasonable limits, one is free to choose a life path, understand the consequences of the path one has chosen, and adjust it as one sees fit. Such a deepened sense of self (and self-responsibility) is necessary in order to receive and attend to the needs and feelings of others. To pursue ethical education conceived in this way, both faith-based and common schools of those societies that initiate into particular traditions and those that educate believers and non-believers from a diversity of worldviews ought to nurture moral agency. Pedagogies of the sacred, which initiate students into intelligent spiritualties that give expression to particular identities, and pedagogies of difference, which teach and learn from and about a variety of worldviews, embody educational processes critical to that end.