What’s Love Got to Do with It
There was plenty of food for thought over the course of Munk+Evergreen Session 2, but what stayed with me well into the rest of the week was a pair of comments made by two of my colleagues. While the class discussed the design-thinking process shown directly below this paragraph, Melissa Nichols brought up what I take to be a grossly overlooked point: we take it for granted that we can even do step 1 correctly. How do we know we are good enough at empathizing that we can successfully integrate such an essential life-activity into our policy practices?
Annie (Quratul) Ayn added to the discussion by questioning the extent to which the MPP curriculum at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy could even allow for or integrate learning to empathize into its educational practices. Gabriel Eidelman half-jokingly suggested that we might run an empathy workshop. Like most good jokes, it contained a truth: how do you teach someone to be empathetic?
It is with that truth in mind that I set out with a goal for this post: create a mini-bibliography on care ethics for the policy student. Now, to be clear, reading about care will not magically transform one into an empathetic machine overnight. But it sure beats never reading about it at all. Not only is the literature on care ethics a useful corrective to some of the more sterile normative theories we are exposed to in our MPP courses (one can only read Rawls so many times) but, as Melissa points out in her most recent piece, it also has serious roots.
Without further ado:
- Introductory (and easily digestible) resources on care ethics:
2. Resources that explicitly discuss care ethics in relation to policy (!!!):
Happy reading!
