panel 10Global Perspectives on Care, Aesthetics, and Moral Sense
Abolition Aesthetics: Aging, Incarceration, and World-Making in Tokyo
Jason Danely
Abolition is an aesthetic process, one of care and imagination as much as resistance, as much about repairing the world as it is about dismantling structures of oppression. Abolitionist aesthetics envision a world where prisons and other sites of punitive confinement are no longer necessary, refocusing our attention on states of disrepair and neglect. It is based on the claim that not only are criminal justice institutions broken, but also that this brokenness exists in a continuum with other forms of brokenness: trauma, impoverishment, fragmented families, and ableist exclusion. I argue that aesthetic practices of repairing sensibilities broken by incarceration provide the grounds for transformative world-making. This brokenness is particularly evident among older incarcerated people, who make up the most rapidly growing segment of the prison population in many countries. Based on five-months of ethnographic fieldwork with formerly incarcerated older adults, this paper describes the reparative work of ex-offender resettlement organizations in Tokyo. Most important was the attention to creating what Aisha Khan calls “carcerality's kinship,” or the feelings of love and solidarity growing out of relationships based on similar experiences of incarceration. For isolated older adults, this kinship was not only a safeguard against reoffending, but a way of imagining life otherwise. Although the increase in older Japanese ex-offenders challenges organizations that lack expertise in the care of older people, these same challenges also offered potential for organizations to shift away from a focus on employment and independence and towards an abolitionist aesthetics of care, vulnerability, and dependence.
Jason Danely is Reader in Anthropology and Chair of the Healthy Ageing & Care Research Network at Oxford Brookes University. Jason’s work focuses on aging as a way to understand the social and political logics that shape the frail and disabled body, and as a window into the phenomenology of chronicity, aesthetics, and care. He is the author of Aging and Loss: Mourning and Maturity in Japan (2014), Fragile Resonance: Caring for Older Family Members in Japan and England (2022) and Unsettled Futures: Carceral Circuits and Old Age in Japan (2024). He has edited two collections, Transitions and Transformations: Cultural Perspectives on Aging and the Life Course (2013) and Vulnerability and the Politics of Care: Transdisciplinary Dialogues (2021). Currently, he is co-editing the Routledge Handbook of Aging in Anthropology and Development Studies. Jason’s current research continues to focus on the lived experiences of formerly incarcerated older adults, fragmentation/repair, and the uses of distraction and humour in carceral settings like prisons and care homes.
The Aesthetics of Care in Ghanaian Rites of Transitions
Sarah Dsane
The care concept has evolved in many fields, including mythology, religion, philosophy, psychology, theology, morality, and practical application, influencing moral attitudes and actions. In recent decades, attempts to understand the practices and meanings of care have led to many approaches to conceptualizing care. These efforts have developed from the concerns of the Women’s Movement, conceiving an ethic of care perspective in women’s moral development. However, Saito argues that care ethics and aesthetic experience are shared, emphasizing that aesthetic experience intertwines with care. When we engage with the world aesthetically, we cultivate a caring relationship. In the rich tapestry of African cultures, rites of passage weave intricate patterns that mark significant transitions in an individual’s life. These rituals are not merely functional; they permeatewith symbolism, community, and caring aesthetics, adding depth and sensory richness to the transformative moments. Symbolic elements include colors, sacred spaces, music and dance, costume and attire, sensory experiences, body movement and gestures, and more. All suggest an understanding of inter-human activity, relational experience, and social practices as having human qualities that understand their aesthetics and influence how they care for others. This paper uses interviews and selected literature to discuss the transition rites for birth, marriage, and eldership among the Ga of Ghana, focusing on the artistic significance, symbolic representations, and care aesthetics that embed the celebrations and performances.
Dr. Sarah Dsane worked as a lecturer and Head of Broadcast Journalism Department at the National Film and Television Institute (NAFTI) (2010-2016). She also worked as a lecturer at the University of California Education Abroad Programme (UCEAP), at the University of Ghana International Programmes (2009-2010).Prior to that, she spent over two decades working in broadcast media as a film/video editor at GBC (1977-2003), and then afterwards at Pentecost Media (PENTMEDIA (2002-2005). She attended Boa Amponsem Secondary School and thereafter obtained a Higher National Diploma (HND) from the National Film and Television Institute (NAFTI) 1992-1995). She also holds a BFA in Theatre Arts, Masters, as well as a PhD in African Studies with specialty in African Family Studies, all obtained from the University of Ghana, Legon (2001- 2009). She also holds a Post Graduate Diploma in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education from the University of Education, Winneba (2013). Sarah has two publications: “Changing Cultures and Care of the Elderly,” which sought to explore the situation of elderly women in Teshie – categorized into childless women and grandmothers to examine the care they received from their adult children and relatives, and a co-authored chapter “Aspects of Sexual Violence Among the Ga of Accra.”
Care and Moral Sense: From First World Moral Perceptions to Critically Caring Motifs of the Third World
Amrita Banerjee
Various representational schemas of the Global North continue to project the Third World as threatening and disruptive to global order. I argue that underlying such representational aesthetics, are specific moral schemas (Johnson, 1993), which, in turn, anchor moral perceptions across the North/South divide. On these schemas, the Third World and Third World subjects become a source of moral distress. While the West sees itself in terms of a commitment to moral universalism, Third World cultures are either perceived to be epistemologically ignorant about universal values or taken to have not arrived at them. These moral schemas, along with repeated moral perceptions guided by them, come to constitute a generalized moral sense about the Third World. The moral sense ensures self-assuredness for the West, and justifies the propagation of neo-colonial epistemologies in the transnational sphere.
I argue that care ethics, with its ontological commitments of relationality and concreteness, along with its epistemological commitments such as reception (Noddings, 1984), the will to care (Hamington, 2010), an evolving notion of the ethical self, and a process-based understanding of moral reasoning, contributes to a new understanding of moral sense. This notion of moral sense is neither based on intuition (unlike versions of classical moral sense theory), nor on a knowledge of universal values. Rather, moral sense is defined as an imaginative capacity with rational and affective dimensions, and based in negotiations and praxis. If moral perceptions are guided by this notion of moral sense, greater reciprocity in ethical relations across the North/South divide might be possible. However, as we seek to extrapolate care ethics to model North/South relations, we also need to be cautious that conceptual resources within the tradition may become double-edged swords within a transnational space marked by global stratification processes and complex colonial histories. There is the need for a transnational intervention into an ethics of care (Banerjee, 2020; 2022). As I articulate a new framework for moral sense to anchor moral perceptions across the North/South divide from the lens of care ethics, I therefore also subject the framework to critical scrutiny from the lens of transnational feminism. The aim is to see whether critically caring motifs of the Third World can emerge.
ReferencesBanerjee, A. (2022). Decolonizing solidarity and reciprocity. In M. Jal, J. Bawane & M. Ali (Eds), An imbecile’s guide to public philosophy (pp. 130-153). Routledge.
Banerjee, A. (2020). A transnational intervention into an ethic of care: Quandaries of care ethics for transnational feminisms. In L. Ayu Saraswati and B. L. Shaw (Eds), Feminist and queer theory: An intersectional and transnational reader (pp. 92-97). Oxford University Press.
Hamington, M. (2010). The will to care: Performance, expectation, and imagination. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 25(3), 675-695.
Johnson, M. (1993). Moral imagination: Implications of cognitive science for ethics. University of Chicago Press.
Noddings, N. (1984). Caring: A feminine approach to ethics and moral imagination. University of California Press.
Amrita Banerjee is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India. She received her PhD in Philosophy and the Graduate Certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of Oregon, USA. Banerjee was an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Allegheny College in Pennsylvania and Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion, Oregon State University in Oregon, USA prior to joining IIT Bombay. She specializes in Moral and Socio-Political Philosophy, which she approaches from the perspectives of Feminist Philosophy, Classical Pragmatism, and Twentieth century Continental philosophy. Banerjee focuses on marginalized intellectual spaces within Philosophy, and especially work by women philosophers and philosophers of color within these traditions. She is also interested in decolonizing Western philosophy, and engaging with hegemonic traditions from a transnational perspective. Her papers have appeared in prestigious journals such as Hypatia, the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, The Pluralist, and Philosophy in the Contemporary World. She is co-editor of the special issue of Philosophy in the Contemporary World titled, “Mothering from the Margins.” She is currently serving on the Advisory Boards of Pragmatism Today, published by the Central-European Pragmatist Forum and the Book series on “Ethics of Care,” published by Peeters in Leuven, Belgium, EU. Banerjee is also on the Advisory Committee of the Advanced Centre for Women’s Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India.
Location
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
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