Research Focus Group Seminar: Care and Disability

In her 1982 work, In a Different Voice, Carol Gilligan outlined a new manner for women to think about moral values and practices, and put forward the concept of care, which has recently been at the core of a new ethics. The ethics of care centers our social relations on vulnerability, dependency, and interdependence. In this session of the Disability Studies Initiative, we will discuss works that address the limit of individual autonomy and the place of disability in the philosophy of care: Eva Feder Kittay’s “The Ethics of Care, Dependence, and Disability” (2011) and Laura Davy’s “Philosophical Inclusive Design: Intellectual Disability and the Limits of Individual Autonomy in Moral and Political Theory” (2015). Please write to: disabilitystudies@english.ucsb.edu to get the readings. Catherine Nesci will moderate the discussion. A Professor of Comparative Literature and French Studies at UC Santa Barbara with courtesy appointment in the Departments of Germanic & Slavic Studies and Feminist Studies, Nesci works at the interface of gender and literary urban studies in modern and contemporary French and Western literatures. Her main scholarly interests include urban genres (flânerie, detection, Noir, the underworld, the popular novel, literary cartographies); gendered cityscapes, gendered embodiments; care, remediation, and literature; memory studies; Shoah & genocide studies; disability studies.

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Sponsored by the IHC’s Disability Studies Initiative Research Focus Group, Comparative Literature Program, Graduate Center for Literary Research, Disabled Students Program, and Commission on Disability Equity