Conference Agenda

This research workshop explores feminist care ethics as a methodological orientation that reconfigures how Organizational Education researchers understand, practice, and relate to knowing and acting. Organizational Education concerns learning that unfolds in, of, and between organizations, and the epistemic, relational, and ethical conditions that make such learning possible (Göhlich et al., 2018). Within this field, feminist care ethics offers an onto‑ethico-political shift— replacing the rational homo oeconomicus with Tronto’s (2017) vision of homines curans (caring people). This shift moves inquiry from knowledge as representation toward knowledge as making and unmaking practice. It foregrounds relationality, situatedness, vulnerability, and response-ability (Haraway, 2016; Tronto, 1993) as central dimensions of research, inviting researchers to reconsider how they perceive, inquire, intervene, and participate.

Drawing on feminist care‑ethics, particularly Tronto’s and Fischer’s (1990) definition of care as “everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible,” the workshop frames research as a relational, world‑sustaining, and world-making practice. Researchers care about their research because it matters to them and to the people and practices they engage with (Brannelly & Barnes, 2022). Care ethics challenge the assumption that researchers stand outside the phenomena they study, instead understanding inquiry as participation in a shared world. This perspective foregrounds responsibilities, embodied and emotional entanglements, and possibilities for transformation. It moves beyond procedural ethics by asking what researchers should sustain, protect, and care for - and why (Eikeland, 2006).

In research‑with‑care, researchers take responsibility for the relational, ethical, and epistemic conditions they co‑create. Recognizing research as a position of privilege, the workshop addresses the responsibilities this entails - responsibilities often left invisible when findings are presented (Brannelly & Barnes, 2022). This includes ongoing reflexivity about how attention is distributed, whose experiences are centered or marginalized, and how power dynamics shape participation (Møller, 2025). Aligned with Brannelly and Barnes’ (2022) commitment to “leave things a little better”, this modest yet profound orientation underscores the ethical ambition of caring inquiry: to contribute to more attentive, equitable, and relationally responsive organizational worlds, even in small and situated ways.

Emphasizing care as repair (Tronto & Fisher, 1990) aligns with Reason’s (1994) call for research to heal the alienation characteristic of modern experience. Within this framing, the distinction between paternalistic caring‑for and democratic caring‑with becomes methodologically significant. It highlights collective, participatory, and political dimensions of inquiry (Tronto, 2013) and foregrounds how researchers and participants co‑shape the conditions of knowing and acting. This orientation binds researchers to the organizational worlds they study and shapes the ethical, epistemic, and political stakes of Organizational Education research.

The workshop embraces an expansive understanding of knowledge aligned with Organizational Education’s interest in tacit, embodied, and practice‑based forms of knowing. Care‑ethical methodologies recognize multiple forms of knowledge—practical wisdom, experiential insight, embodied and affective knowing, and sensitive, situated understanding (Brannelly & Barnes, 2022). Such approaches place lived experience at the center of inquiry and value the multiplicity of perspectives in organizational settings.

Care‑ethical methodologies attend to the situated messiness of life: the unexpected, unpleasant, and unsettled. Care-full research becomes explicitly ethical and political by ensuring that experiences of oppression, marginalization, and injustice are placed at the center of inquiry (Brannelly & Barnes, 2022),. Seeking just outcomesinvolves asking: how knowledge, justice, care, and power intersect to produce harm, exclusion, or epistemic injustice. This includes recognizing how some groups—such as people with disabilities, mental health challenges, or marginalized identities—are routinely unheard or discredited in organizational contexts. Care ethics invites attentiveness not only to individuals but also to the cultural, material, discursive entanglements that assign differential credibility to knowers and knowledge systems.