 Thank you for choosing to spend your time with us on a Saturday afternoon for this book talk and discussion. Care is a topic that touches each of our lives yet often remains unspoken in its full depth and transformative details and potential. We at Mechanics Institute are excited to share with you the profound insights of Maurice Hammington's revolutionary care, commitments and ethos and hope that you will take what you learned here today and weave into the rich tapestry of your own lived experiences and experiences going forward. My name is Nico Chen and I am the Program Manager at Mechanics Institutes. For those of you who are attending their first event sponsored here by Mechanics Institute, welcome. Mechanics Institute was founded in 1854 and is one of San Francisco's most vital literary and cultural centers in the hearts of the city. Mechanics Institute features a full-service general interest library, an internationally renowned chess club, ongoing author and literary programs in the cinema lit film series. A recent article in the San Francisco standard describes us as the coolest library in downtown San Francisco and a remote work sanctuary. Come see this for yourself by joining us for a free tour which happens every Wednesday at noon. We also welcome you to browse our upcoming events at mylibrary.org backslash events. Now I will introduce the wonderful Maurice Hammington. Maurice Hammington is professor of philosophy and affiliate faculty of women, gender and sexuality studies at Portland State University. He writes about the theory and application of feminist care ethics. His latest book, Revolutionary Care, Commitment and Ethos argues that we need a care revolution right now and you can participate. He is also author of Care Ethics and Poetry, the social philosophy of Jane Adams, embodied care, and Hail Mary, the struggle for ultimate womanhood and Catholicism. Hammington also holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Oregon and a PhD in Religion and Social Ethics and an MBA from the University of Southern California. He is currently working as a consultant for two major grants in the UK on Care Ethics and Aesthetics. He is a Fulbright specialist who will spend November of this year in Kyoto working with Japanese feminist care ethicists. For more information on his scholarly activities, please go to his website mhammington.com which I will also be entering into our chat box today. Thank you once again for being here and for your willingness to engage in this personal and political exploration of care, especially on a beautiful Saturday afternoon like this. We will now move into Maurice Hammington's talk and I hope that this will help us deepen our collective understanding of care ethics and inspire us to think about how we can further enact revolutionary care in our own lives and community. We will also have a Q&A with the audience after Maurice's talk, so please make sure to add your questions to the chat and I will read them aloud once Maurice finishes. Maurice, please take us away. Thank you for that wonderful introduction, Nico, and thank you for this opportunity. Because we are a small group today and we can keep it fairly informal and if anybody wants to stop me at any time to ask a question, just raise your hand or blurt out the question or whatever and we can do it because we have a pretty small intimate group here. I do want to begin with a brief land acknowledgement. My school, Portland State University is located in the heart of downtown Portland, Oregon in Multnomah County, the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Multnomah, Cathlamet, Clackamas, Tumwater, Watlala Bands of the Chinook, the Tualatin, Kayapua, and many other Indigenous nations of the Columbia River. I think it's important to acknowledge this place's ancestors and recognize that we're here because of the sacrifices forced upon them. In remembering these communities, I honor their legacy, their lives and their descendants and in making this acknowledgement, I endeavor to recognize the privilege that allows me to stand before you. Given enough time, I would also do a labor acknowledgement for all the labor that has participated in allowing me to be here and also a care acknowledgement for all the relationships that have sustained me and allowed me to become who I am. As someone who presents as a white male, I have enjoyed many advantages not available to those with other identities and really this talk is about building communities across diverse identities and so these acknowledgements are not just lip service but really kind of central to what we're talking about here. This presentation begins with a little story of transformation and then I want to talk about the power of care, what good care is, what a commitment to care and what an ethos of care is. Okay so I'd like to start with a little story and this is a story that's in the book Revolutionary Care and it is every chapter of the book begins with an anecdote, a story about care and this first one is and some of them are quite surprising. The first one is a little unusual, it's about someone named Derek Black. You may have heard of Derek Black who's been in and out of the news over the last 10 years. He was born in 1989 in West Palm Beach, Florida. He was the heir apparent to the white nationalist movement in the United States. His godfather is David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. His father, Don Black, popularized the term white nationalism and created the racist website Stormfront.org. The Southern Poverty Law Center describes Stormfront as the murder capital of the internet because of the number of racially motivated murders committed by members. It is the most popular white extremist website with over 300,000 registered members. At age 10 Derek created a website for white nationalist children. In his early teens he hosted a white nationalist radio program with his father. Despite his youth he was an articulate, smart and popular speaker and spoke often at white nationalist meetings. He was charismatic and he was quite comfortable defending his views against attack and he was attacked a lot. His biographer Eli Sasslow documented Derek Black's personal transformation in the book Rising Out of Hatred, the awakening of a former white nationalist. Sasslow says on the air he repeatedly theorized about the criminal nature of Blacks and the inferior natural intelligence of Blacks and Hispanics. He said President Obama was anti-white culture a radical Black activist and inherently un-American. There was nothing micro about Derek's aggression. That was Sasslow. Black's original posture of exclusion makes a fascinating case for a care theorist to contemplate given his evolution into an open-minded and compassionate individual. His story is kind of a challenge to care ethicists because we're talking about caring across difference. What about caring for people who we find their positions abhorrent? Can we care about those folks? I've been asked that question many times. In 2010, still steeped in his white nationalism, Black began attending the New College of Florida in Sarasota, Florida. I don't know if you're following the news but New College of Florida is one of Ron DeSantis' target colleges. He's removed the entire board and put conservative folks in charge there and is trying to transform the culture from a progressive to a very conservative institution largely because of Derek Black's case and what happened here. While he was going to class as Black maintained a low profile, he surreptitiously would host his radio show. He would go to class and then go off campus to host the show. Eventually, his identity came to light and he was confronted even by a small mob on campus. But again, he's used to defending himself against angry attackers and he was okay dealing with their concerns. But a few students at New College took a different tact. Their names were Allison Gornick and Jewish students Matthew Stevenson and Moshe Ash. They decided to befriend Black despite the fact that they did find his positions abhorrent. They wanted to understand him better and start a dialogue with him. So after much time spent together including difficult but respectful listening and responding, Black gradually began to have a change of heart and mind. And I'm fast forwarding over months, even years of this. And again, it's all kind of chronicled in Eli Saslow's book. At one point, Steven explicitly told Gornick that the relationship was transformative enough and he did not want to push too hard directly challenging Black's beliefs. Indeed, the presence of accepting Jewish friends who welcomed him, this was an idea that was anathema to white nationalists, right? Was sufficient for Black to start to question his views regarding cultural superiority. They had many shared meals and discussions. Eventually, Black came to the very difficult decision to renounce his white nationalism. And he did so in a very public manner. He had an article, a letter published in the New York Times, renouncing it. This was a major blow to the white nationalist movement, the organizations that had been so supportive of him and his family. As you can imagine, he got all kinds of threats. His family got all kinds of threats because of this. His family also somewhat turned their back on him. Black continued to pursue his academic career and he is now completed a PhD in history. And he is a frequent commentator about issues of white nationalism. He really regrets what part he played during the election of Trump in fomenting white nationalist ideas. But going back to the idea of care, his coming out letter, which was in the New York Times in 2016, specifically discussed how it was the relationships more so than simply arguments that transformed him. He said, several years ago, I began attending a liberal college where my presence prompted huge controversy through many talks with devoted and diverse people there. People who chose to invite me into their dorms and have conversations rather than ostracize me, I began to realize the damage I had done. At one point, there was a follow-up article done in The Daily Beast on Derek Black called Derek Black the Reluctant Racist and his exit from white nationalism. And the author who wrote about Black's experience and Derek corresponded with the author and said, you got everything right except you didn't emphasize the caring relationship enough. He said, the people who were important in the process of changing my mind were those who were my friends regardless, but who let me know when we talked about it that they thought my beliefs were wrong for specific reasons and took the time to provide evidence and civil arguments. I didn't always agree with their ideas, but I listened and they listened to me. Care is a contextually driven moral approach and care allowed Black to have a moral epiphany. It's within the crucible, within the comfort, within the letting down of one's guard, within care that the imagination is allowed to flow and make connections. We have in today's world powerful narratives of human division around fear and hate and their Black story isn't intended to say that this is the way to cure it or that this example is one that can be replicated in other cases or most cases or anything like that. There won't be a simple formula for overcoming it, but it does show the power of care in this because as Black credits it, it's really the care that transformed him. The book has a number of stories that are like that in there. What I'd like to do is provide a little bit of background, say a few words about care, say a few words about the ethics of care, and then talk about some of the concepts in the book. Again, please feel free to stop me if I say something that's not clear. We'll start with care. Care is a ubiquitous term. We use it all the time in many different ways and many different sayings. You also see it all the time in advertising. As I watch advertising, most every single corporation claims that they care about you. I've even seen oil companies claim that they care about me. That's an interesting rhetorical phenomenon because it shows that these corporations know that there's something powerful about care. There's something basic about it. They're trying to co-opt it into their marketing campaigns, but it's also a hint at the power of care. I should also say that care itself out of context is a kind of morally neutral word because there's a lot of times where care is invoked and it is not done in a good way, in a way that rises to what we might consider a good standard of care. For example, colonial powers use the word care in a very paternalistic way. You think about what's been done to indigenous people to pull them out of their culture through school systems that separate them from their family and their traditions. A lot of times that's couched in care. Abusers will often engage in cruel activities and also frame that as a kind of care. Even in disability studies or what's sometimes today called crypt theory, care is a negative term because for those with disabilities, sometimes care implies so much paternalism that it takes away their agency, their ability to make their own decisions. Care itself is sometimes used in a neutral or even a negative kind of way. That's why in this book I actually address a lot of what good care is, but I'll talk about that in a minute. Another thing I want to say about care is care is a counter narrative to kind of a meta historical theme that we have that the history of the world has been created through competition, survival of the fittest, dog eat dog kind of world. Well, there's an alternative story around care that it is compassion and cooperation that has really allowed humanity to thrive and survive. Care is so very important. We know as individuals that care is important because when we're born, we are extremely vulnerable and if somebody doesn't care for us immediately, then we will die. We really need to have people care for us. Care is very basic to humanity. Also, there's an embodied dimension to care. Care is first experienced through the body and it is delivered through the body. I wrote a book over 20 years ago called Embodied Care and where I make this point and even when we do complex kind of caring like when we develop policies for institutions or something that are caring, we're drawing upon metaphors that we know in our own body. Children understand care in their body even before they have language, they understand what care is. Last point about care is it has historically not been valued in human history and part of that is because care has been feminized associated with the work of women and women's work is like all things that belong to women have been devalued. It's only recently that care has been valued greater but even today we still pay care laborers less in my fields and in scholarly fields. Care has not up until very recently been considered an important subject for consideration and so kind of fighting against that baggage, that historical baggage. Okay, I'm going to turn my attention to something called the ethics of care or care ethics. That's a relational approach to morality very much driven by context. It is different than other moral approaches because time matters, proximity matters, imagination matters to care in ways that traditional ethical approaches tended to try to figure out answers to moral dilemmas. It's more like trying to figure out the right thing to do. I mean that's what Immanuel Kant said, what is the right thing to do and in care does care about what the right thing to do is but it also cares about how we live our life and how we exist in right relationship with one another. The term itself came into western thought in the 1980s and it bubbled up from different feminist scholars in different fields in psychology, in philosophy, in education and at first it was very much a niche field of study but today we're living in what I call the golden age of care ethics because it is now in all kinds of different fields. We've got lots of articles in business ethics journals on on on care, in education, in geography, anthropology, the social sciences, the hard sciences, humanities and it's across this one and it's around the world. Nico mentioned I'm going to Japan. I spent a month with scholars in Italy. I spent a month with scholars in France working on care ethics. Every continent has care ethicists and now we have international organizations that are working on care. We have conferences, multiple conferences every year on on care ethics. There's journals devoted to it, a book series devoted to it and why is it so popular because traditional approaches aren't answering the questions in a way that really accounts for the human condition. Traditional analytic approaches, today's neoliberal answers that are very market-driven leave a lot of people wanting. There's plenty of books and I have a bunch of them that are titled something to do with the crisis of care in the world and and so how do we elevate care? How do we make it more central? How do we bring it to the center or being that's kind of what the ethic of care tries to do? A few more things about the ethics of care. One is that some people because care is such a ubiquitous word some people have trouble separating it from a common understandings and so I want to make it clear for example that care is not altruism in its absolute sense. Sometimes we think of altruism as like I have to be completely selfless. I can only be motivated by doing something good for somebody else. Well it's good to have those kinds of motivations but care does not have some standard or perfection to it. You can care about yourself. Self-care is very important because if you don't care for yourself it's going to make it hard to care for others in any kind of meaningful way and so you can have care for the self. You can have motivations that aren't always the purest and it still has the impact of care. Another misconception about care is that care means that it ends disagreement or conflict and that's not true. When you're in a caring community you feel more comfortable bringing up your concerns and so conflict doesn't go away. In fact it actually in a way fosters the discussion of conflict in a caring environment and the other thing about care is it is not just about good feelings. There has to be actions involved. Also I should say that care is not just a personal morality. Sometimes it gets confused with that that is just on the personal level but it also has a strong political dimension. I advise you to go to the website for Black Lives Matter and read their founding documents and their mission statement. You will see care written through it all a very inclusive approach to care. So I wrote revolutionary care to clarify a few things. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the book right now. So it's divided into two parts. The first half of the book is more some theoretical concepts that I wanted to explore a little deeper and then the second half of the book are some what I call controversial invitations and provocations. What I mean by that is sometimes care ethicists are a little bit reluctant to enter into difficult conversations because care is so contextual and it doesn't have kind of an absolute rule based to it. But what I say is like if you buy my argument in the first part of the book and that you have a commitment to care that maybe you should consider these controversial ideas. Okay so let me go back to just a few of the theoretical ideas in general. I think perhaps the most important one the first half of the book is the concept of good care and the concept of good care is controversial as I said because care is so very contextual but I don't actually give you the answer to what good care is. What I get what I describe good care is this is a set of skills it's a methodology it's a process. So good care I describe as having three things humble inquiry inclusive connection and responsive action humble inquiry confronting the other and with humility not knowing the answers not prejudging the person but engaging an inquiry and trying to understand them a little bit better. The second is inclusive connection we're more motivated if we make a connection with the other and it's easy to make connections with those who are family and friends of us those we're close to the hard thing to do is to include others that's why I call it inclusive connection making that connection is the imaginative the empathetic part of care and empathy is a big theme within care and then the final thing is responsive action not just action but responsive action responding to the need of the other not prejudging not knowing what the answer is but responding to their need those three things I think are hallmarks of good care and they don't it's not formulaic it doesn't come in any particular order and sometimes it doesn't come at all but but good deep care has those things. I'm Nico I know I'm about our time just I'm just going to go a little bit longer because of course that's really fine yeah we have a small group anyway so I'm just going to go a little longer so besides good care I talk about the the norms of care and trying to raise the social standards around care and in particular I think that we can have you know a care movement a revolution of care where we have more humble inquiry more inclusion and more responsive action and what I think is different about care ethics versus other approaches is that instead of knowing what right and wrong is irrespective of the situation care ethics is more improvisational again it's a methodology and so it the right thing to do the norm emerges from the situation all I know is I want to care I don't know exactly how to care for you until we meet one another and I understand your needs and then you know if I if I engage you properly then I may know how to care for you better um okay so I talk about norms I spend another chapter talking about the concept of commitment and I like this word commitment when it comes to morality because a lot of times we think about morality we think about rules that are imposed upon us from the outside duties laws commandments whatever but with commitment that's internal that's where I have agency commitment is it is you know in part very motivating right because I've committed to this you know and so you know for example when you commit yourself to a relationship you there is motivation there you've made this decision and so your your your engage becomes kind of an abiding part of who you are it transforms your own identity so I spent a chapter on identity I'm in on commitment and then I also spend a chapter on what I call the ethos of care this word ethos I think is very interesting it's a it's what I described as a kind of care spirituality it's a it's this this idea that I'm going to have this spirit of care I'm going to enter my relationships in a kind of open way where I'm looking for opportunities to care as they arise and um and try to engage you know in the practices of good care the thing about a spirit of care like all spirits it can be contagious and this is where we can transform communities groups institutions and so and it doesn't matter where you are it doesn't matter if I'm talking about a university a hospital a church group or the mechanics institute if you see your colleagues operating with a spirit of care for one another and for those that you confront it becomes a kind of contagion because remember I said care is embodied you have the capacities to care that doesn't mean we always practice it that doesn't mean we you know some of our capacities have an atrophied from lack of use but it's there and so the spirit of care can raise this up in that way so again the second half of the book is the more controversial part of it so I've set out the theoretical and I say okay so if you're if you're going to be committed to care you may want to consider again it's a provocation it's not a rule not telling you what good care is for you I'm just saying you may want to think about some of these radical positions okay so if we're thinking about care is revolutionary that means there may be some radical positions to this and so one I discussed is feminism I spent a chapter on feminism as a way to resist toxic masculinity because we have many forms of masculinity that are anti caring that keep caring at arm's length and so to challenge that thinking about uh you know committing to feminism as well again just a provocation another one is socialism not so much like a particular form of economy but a an economy that puts society at the center okay so I'm not you know I'm not specifically talking about Marxism or any you know I'm not a technical economist what I'm saying is trying to create a care economy where the highest standard is how we care for our society and and how we put for example infrastructure in place to care for one another so socialism the third one is humanism humanism why humanism to resist a kind of religious dogmatism uh one uh another whenever we get dogmatic whenever rules become more important than people there is the possibility of separating us from one another and so I I think of care ethics as agnostic about religion uh a care ethicist shouldn't care if you're religious or not that's not important what's important is is that you're not ideological and dogmatic to the point where the rules become more important than the people um the fourth thing I have is uh veganism uh again um to try to think about our relationships to the non-human world and caring um that is holistic um and um and you know and taking that to thinking about the pain and suffering of other beings so all of that is uh so that's that's kind of a quick summary that but well there is one there is the final chapter the conclusion where I talked about revolutionary care and that is I take uh uh I take uh a lot of work from this German feminist Eva von Rettiker who has looked at the history of revolutions in the world and even though our our imagination we like to think about revolutions as these events um that she says they're actually uh revolutions are always a process and you can have those events or not have those events uh and we have revolutions that didn't have events it's just a process of change a transformation of uh of uh of society uh that um uh usually takes a lot of individual kinds of efforts and I think that we can have a care revolution uh where we put relationships and and how we include others uh at the forefront uh and bring this um about um I'm gonna stop with just going back to um I'm gonna go back to the words of of Nell Nottings um when this originally was a teacher's tea I was gonna talk um uh about education and so Nell Nottings is quite appropriate but I can still end with her words she um uh has a has a she has a quote that I put on all of my syllabi Nell Nottings was one of the founding mothers of care ethics she was a Stanford philosopher and educator um who taught high school and then uh university uh level uh and she passed away last november um uh the quote is uh the student is always more important than the subject the student is more always more important than the subject and that sounds really kind of common sense to most people but any of us who are in education know that we get so fixated on our on our area our field of study and what we're teaching that we sometimes think that you know we gotta focus on that this kind of similar to my comment about ideology that we gotta remember that the people are more important and so the student the well-being of the student is more important than the subject and if we extend that out uh to for example workers um then workers are more important than the work that they do um leader um leaders are more important than the responsibilities that they have we have to always remember there's people behind these titles and that we uh and that we can care across those um distinctions okay I kind of whip through a lot of things there uh I can I'm happy to talk further about uh any subject or fill in anything that I uh may have just kind of uh given kind of a super superficial uh coverage to thank you for sharing all this um with us Maurice Hamilton um I think Alyssa has a question um Alyssa do you want me to read your question aloud or would you like to read it yourself I can I oh Alyssa you cut out for a moment there okay my question sort of jumped back to when you were talking about this idea of care being very feminized and how we can work to balance that and then on the flip side I wrote this carefully really tiring as a woman and it's not as expected as men and so I often feel like and it has been named even in my field like when people need things I feel like we sometimes as women we flip into a very caring position and it is not expected of men to do the same um so like how can we work to name that and balance that well I mean your question um shows an insight into you know this phenomenon that's going on and it is still true today even um after decades of feminism that the burden of care still falls more on women um the good news is uh that we see some of the norms changing even if all the behaviors haven't uh completely changed and you can kind of mirror this in care ethics um at first in the 1980s it was all women feminist philosophers who were writing about it and now we have a lot of men who are writing about care um you know and and talking about issues of masculinity and uh and and care in fact there is a there's a there's a new podcast they only have like a handful of podcasts um by uh somebody by the name of Rob Martin called um uh careful careful thinking I think is what it's called and it's a podcast and and and Rob is actually a religion scholar who is uh who's written about issues of masculinity uh and care oh and there's a wonderful book uh by an anthropologist uh who had to care for a severely disabled son and did a study on men and what it did to their masculinity thinking about uh you know care um and so you know I um that's why I spend a chapter talking about about feminism um as bell hooks said feminism is for everyone and we really need to um uh shift the thinking about the care burdens in society and you know how do we get there we get there uh by people talking about it by changing policies uh and practices um and you know it's going to be a slow grind uh these are quite entrenched ideas in society uh but there are uh but there are many people working to kind of uh push us um in a different direction uh and um uh and you know I hope that this book Revolutionary Care has some uh small uh push in that direction as well and I want to just piggyback off of that Maurice um I know that the field of philosophy has been around for eons and care ethics kind of only really appeared in you know through now knowing this is work in like the 80s right and so it's only really been around for about 40 years and even in my own experience in academia I didn't come across care ethics until my late 30s and I you know was interested in reading philosophy and other theories from other works and it really took that deep difficult time during the pandemic of like wafting through just the miasma of educational theory that I came across your work and it was an aha moment so this is not something that was taught within my class this was something that through like a deep uncaring period in time when we are all you know deeply afraid of the sickness that I actually found care ethics to kind of be a beacon in this in this difficult time that's a I mean that's a great story and it's it's so very true um um I never took a care ethics course in graduate school I don't know that there were any available I'm currently teaching care ethics I teach care ethics courses in at portland state university and when I go to japan for a month I'll be teaching graduate students a care ethics course well you know while I'm there but it's slowly catching on just earlier um no I guess last year at the end of last year I did an informal survey through my own list serves and contacts and I wanted to know how many people were teaching a care ethics course at their school and and at what level and I got well over 100 responses of faculty so things are changing but things are changing slowly you know you know perhaps if you if you went to school today maybe your odds of of of getting a care ethics course you know would be increased but it is a relatively new and and just like you there's there's a hunger out there I have graduate students contacting me from all over um I had an economic student from the UK wanted it you know care ethics I had a design graduate student from Spain wanted to do care ethics several and social work from India India seems to be really catching on I did three presentations online for schools in India last year there is there's a hunger out there and uh that's a good sign um and you know hopefully the momentum will keep up and we'll we'll start to shift it because there's there's something new there's something about care that seems to fulfill a need and Maurice um I wanted to ask a question that emerged you talk about story and you know um you it's funny because usually in academia we talk about case studies right but you talk about it as a story why is story so important and how does it intersect with care ethics um well let me let me say a couple of things um what happens with a case study is um a case study is always a kind of reduction uh and doesn't take into account all the variables of society you know so the one of the classic case studies uh that is you know very popular in ethics today in they write a there's books on it and all kinds of discussions is the trolley problem okay this this trolley problem there's runaway trolley and you're uh you can pull a lever and it can go this way and and it's going to kill people if if you let it go but if you pull a lever maybe it'll kill less and there's all kinds of variations on this case study the problem with case studies is that they're they're just reductionist they um uh they don't uh they don't take into account issues of time space and variability um and um and so with care ethics you know care ethics uh in some of the original work on care ethics um it came out that a lot of people didn't like case studies this is carol gilligan's original work in a different voice didn't like case studies because it was just too truncated it didn't um allow for uh more questions to be asked and and answers now why do so okay so what's that versus me telling stories or i wrote the book care ethics in poetry you know why poetry because um there um you you get a little kind of slice of the human condition and it's not so much a case study um as it is a bit of an insight into um actual people's lives and i and i think um the power of story you know why do we love stories why do we love novels we are drawn in our imaginations we empathize with the characters and we start to draw connections and understanding uh in it and so this is why you know the arts have a great capacity to help us with our with our caring right because they can they can uh spark the imagination they can allow us those kinds of moral epiphanies uh where maybe we think about um you know others differently um they're i'm writing a chapter for a book or i'm um i'm starting with the the story of uh the the old comedy television show will and grace um because will and grace occurred at a unique time in history where in the united states we were passing all kinds of anti same-sex marriage laws um and then uh what uh you know pew and other surveying companies said it was the fastest transformation they've ever seen in the you know in the span of a decade or so we became very accepting generally speaking of same-sex marriage in this country i know there's currently a little bit of a backlash going on but but uh we became much more accepting and during that period of time you know there some people have raised the question of uh what role did will and grace have and and again we watched this tv show it was funny we connected with the characters we empathized and you know for some people that go huh you know uh maybe will and jack uh are just kind of like us and they want to be happy and live fulfilling lives and have relationships and there's a kind of connection that's made um you know through those kinds of stories even if it's just commercial television so um uh actually at one point uh when um biden was vice president under obama he actually uh he actually uh claimed perhaps a little bit too profusely that will and grace did more for advancing same-sex marriage than than anything he might have been a little bit too optimistic but um still the point is that the that kind of connection and story makes a difference in people's lives and so i do think stories are important um what you are saying marie makes my heart sing because um the mechanics institute has a monthly storytelling showcase and it really connects our community together we're also working with master storyteller kate ferrell to do a storytelling workshop that will culminate in the world in a showcase as well so you know this is how helps me realize that this work is actually deeply caring on some level as well and you know we are also celebrating national poetry months soon and I wanted to read a poem that you included in revolutionary care um if you will give me just a minute to read this it's inquiry by lisa devuelo I hope I pronounced that last name right devuelo start with your own question it doesn't have to be profound it just has to have a wondering so you have no idea where it might lead not only no idea but no worry about how far from your own clutching it might take you a question that doesn't have one answer rather opens the possibility for even more not ones that have been living under that tired story buried on the back of your heart start with a question that doesn't make you feel like this is the only one you'll ever have a one that can hold you like a hammock or a cradle or an old painted robot in which you might let yourself drift far enough away from the shore of familiar Maurice can you just talk a little bit about why you decided to choose this poem and include it in this book and also how care ethics is connected with poetry uh yeah thank you for reading that um I think the spirit of that poem really kind of captured a disposition of care there's a French concept called responsibility it's a kind of openness a morality that um um I forgot his name um so Gabriel Marcel a French uh a French thinker uh developed and um you know this this the the openness that this poem um uh described and allowing life to take you this is the the improvisational aspect uh of care um that you know we I don't know you just don't know the answers you gotta kind of follow the questions uh sometimes and um and again I think uh poetry is kind of an amazing thing it's actually relatively few words but poets are so good at capturing human emotion and feeling and and and connection that they can have a profound impact in what really is an economy of words uh and and so um the arts and the humanities I think are so very important uh you know right now they're they're under attack in our neoliberal world right um the market uh so that this has has you know kind of declared that this is a frivolous activity uh you know not worthy of teaching or spending as much time on but it actually is extremely important uh to our imagination and um one of the exciting things going on with the ethics of care is uh the whole new field of care aesthetics and we have uh poets artists uh dramaturgists performers uh even dancers who are uh discussing care in very rich kind of ways and what uh and and and through the arts we can um learn so much uh about what it is uh what it is to care I mean even just delving into our own emotions and understanding our own emotions in a way that allows us to understand others better is so important and we don't we don't take time to do that kind of work generally speaking I mean you don't have an elementary school class in the emotions or relationships we don't have those things uh if you're lucky we have some classes on the arts and uh and those are these really these really great opportunities for um for self-exceleration uh if you know if I were in charge of things I would have everyone uh take a course in acting uh for example not acting in order to become a professional actor but in order to study the human condition what do actors do they study emotions they study how to comport one another they interpret they inhabit uh you know uh uh characters and what a wonderful skill of empathy and understanding that is um so uh so I you know I'm a big uh supporter of the arts and I think in some ways you know the fact that it's called the ethics of care is very limiting because ethics has this very narrow understanding in western tradition but care aesthetics to me opens it up uh quite a bit and I like the fact that we have scholars who are doing that kind of work just to extend that um Maurice I think that perfectly segues to one line in your acknowledgments of your book and you write I repeatedly find that care theorists practice what they theorize about um so you know I think in a lot of academia we theorize theorize theorize but then there's a wall but then how does sort of care theory kind of I don't know help that wall to sub dissipate between theory and practice um you know that was mostly an observation about my colleagues all over the world uh who who who do care ethics and um I have just found them very open and willing to help uh new students um uh each other uh in in in a multiple a multiple ways and I think you know I think that kind of um integrity and consistency is is very refreshing uh and um and I think um you know as teachers we uh we can do lots of things but if we if we practice care that's going to have more of an impact on our students than anything we can say last month I had the pleasure of hearing uh the president of West Georgia State University talk who is on one of the boards of uh an organization for public universities and he very articulate um speaker and reticent but he was talking about how well one thing he was talking about was a a Pew survey from 10 years ago um that looked at college graduates 30 years after graduation and what had the biggest impact on their lives and um uh they named a number of things but the the top of three included when a faculty member was acted caring toward me I mean the others were kind of relational as well mentorship and that kind of stuff but but um and this study was looking at how um happy they were with their lives how um fulfilled they were with their lives and and so these relational moments that we have these opportunities are so important uh and I aspire to be you know one of these scholars one of these care ethicists who you know never turns away a student and always tries to find a way uh to care for them because I think that will have a much bigger impact than any you know piece of information or interesting theory I have uh uh about care you gotta you kind of you kind of have to show it right it's embodied care so it has to be there I think and I would also love to loop back to um your idea that theater can be more than just craft but actual embodied learning and you know my colleague Alyssa is actually um practices the theater arts in her past as well um Alyssa um I invite you to also um maybe whether or not you want to to confirm or sort of push back on what Maurice Hamilton's theory is that you know these types of acting classes could perhaps um teach us how to better care um what do you think Alyssa are you are you still around oh no I totally agree I think practicing embodiment and empathy allows us to figure out how to do that I mean that would actually be interesting isn't there a lot of research on like how you know it's not fake it till you make it kind of feeling right yeah there's um I think there's um there are uh I think when I was writing the embodied care or maybe one of my other um uh published works I was uh doing some research I found um acting teachers at universities who would teach classes on acting for life you know again as opposed to trying to become a professional actor right uh but learning some of the skills the the attention um oh yeah there's a there's a whole field called performance philosophy uh it's it's relatively new they've got a great website lots of free stuff there if you ever go to it uh performance philosophy and um the the founder of that that movement uh discusses uh theater as attention training isn't that interesting attention training and you know what do we want to do in care we want to attend to the other now nonnings would talk about being engrossed with the other but it's it's an attending it's my concept of humble inquiry you know with the other and so if if if theater is attention training um you know then then that seems like an excellent skill uh for caring people uh to have there is uh some scholars in Italy at the University of Verona who um have developed uh systems for uh k-12 students young children to um be able to identify their own emotions and identify and deal with the emotions of others uh at a very young age um with the you know with the idea that that's going that kind of attention training is going to be helpful for them in their relationships and and and and dealing with others uh it's already had wonderful results in terms of reducing uh some of the aggressive conflict in uh in elementary schools but more importantly I think it's a knowledge you know that's important for us again as I said before we don't pay attention to any of those um quote unquote soft skills I don't like calling them soft skills because I think they're important skills but the soft skills in um our uh in our education system and I think we should and and it can be couched in uh you know this this idea of making us more uh caring and fulfilled adults um to connect what you said Maurice um there's a beautiful essay or chapter by the um by the wonderful philosopher Simone Vey about attention and she talks about how attention is not just um focusing on certain things which a lot of our educational system does it focuses on like your reading and writing skills in a very particular way but she talks about attention almost like being able to go to like the top of a mountain and seeing kind of the vista and being aware of just how complex the natural ecosystem is around you what do you consider Simone Vey to be part of care ethics in her sort of approach to attention yeah there are a lot of um there are a lot of uh what what how should we describe it care ethics adjacent scholars uh Simone Vey you know uh didn't use the term care ethics uh but um has been quoted by uh many care ethicists uh and their scholarship is uh is important uh for them so um yes and um you know I I started to say something I don't think I finished it uh completely uh when I was uh doing the introduction you you know I said that uh that care ethics um was developed you know the idea came into western thinking in the 1980s and the reason I say it that way is because there's a lot of non-western and indigenous uh traditions that have contemplated care in very deep and complex ways and we can learn a lot from them uh uh you know just some examples would be like the kree uh in in canada uh have a concept called walka talking which is um which is very much a care uh culture uh to it uh there is um there's the african notion I forgot the name now but there's an african notion that's very similar to care um there have been articles about confusion care uh uh drawing on on on constant there's actually quite a few articles um about it and so anyway my point is that um I don't want to um have the hubris to say that uh that you know care ethics is this uh unique western thing it's not uh there's there's lots of um uh lots of traditions that um we should uh we should try to learn from your I'm going to add a pin to my video because I wanted to share with you also an acknowledgement from the san francisco public library um because oftentimes you know I I am still learning how to care across differences and I'm still at a moment in time when I'm not quite sure how to do a land acknowledgement that is I don't know like it lands well but this one actually is for children and I work with um the mechanics institute on our family story hour and this is the one that I use with children which is here is the land touch the ground and here is the sky touch reach up to the sky here are my friends and we we open our arms out to friends and here am I and I hug myself and then I say um we stand together hand in hand and thank the ramatouche aloni the traditional caretakers of this land this land on which we like to play we promise to look after it every day and you know I think this land acknowledgement also attests to sort of the validity of care ethics because it's such an embodied thing and children understand care extremely well and sometimes I think of it as we as children know how to care but we sometimes forget about that like what is it of the human experience in an adulthood that we um forget um and that would be my last question for you today. Well I think it's um you know it's a common phenomenon you've probably heard studies where you know uh children of different culture uh babies or young children of different cultures are put together they play just fine you know and it's only as they grow these narratives of division and fear uh you know seep into our you know our way of being that we that um uh that we have these these struggles but it's um but that's why I'm so hopeful is because at bottom our our we we have the capacity to care we want to care um and we want to be cared for if we could get past our prejudices and uh and these stories that we tell about one another um I you know I think you know care can really flourish I loved your um acknowledgement I've been I've been working for the last year and last week I spent the entire uh week at uh Cal Poly Humboldt in uh in northern California uh working with their office of diversity equity and inclusion and uh we're working on a campus-wide care ethics uh care ethos really a spirit of care it's going to be in their anti-racist language it's going to be in their constitution all kinds of things we're trying to infuse the language of care and raise the value of care on that campus because it is a Hispanic serving institution um amongst other things uh the reason I bring it up is uh they've developed a rich system of doing a land acknowledgement a labor acknowledgement and we uh together we kind of started the beginnings of developing a care uh acknowledgement a kind of relational acknowledgement um you know and I and you know what do these acknowledgements do they situate us they put us in connection in relationship with others and get us away from this disembodied head that's going to be uh you know kind of speaking or um and just it's kind of a nice uh a nice reminder and I for me it's also you know a kind of reminder around humility to um to remember uh given all the oppression in the world you know how very privileged I am and I've been very privileged to be uh a part of this afternoon well Maurice thank you so much for being here with us I'm also going to pop into our link uh our chat box the link to purchase Maurice's book and Maurice I know a lot of our members are interested in getting their books signed is there any way to actually do that um I I would love to come to San Francisco and the mechanics institute sometime in the future and uh maybe we can work that out you know of course and would you like to also share any of the upcoming events that you have that you also want us to partake in um let's see I you know there's going to be I think there's going to be a book launch uh sponsored by others but I don't actually have any events uh I don't have any events to talk about uh I know there's presentations I'm going to be doing but I don't have anything to uh to announce specifically check my website of course we are very blessed to have you come and join us on this beautiful Saturday afternoon I know that we all could be outside and just enjoying mother nature in her most caring majesty but I think this is also a very caring space of caring holding space that you have created for us today Maurice thank you and um for those of you who um want to say goodbye um I welcome you to turn on your cameras to wave goodbye to Maurice and share your care embodied care um visually with us today if not and you want to keep your privacy that's also okay but um Maurice I will be following up with you soon and thank you again for um doing this event with us here at Mechanics Institute. Sure thing thank you Nico Malcolm thanks for coming Alyssa uh thanks and um I you know I've been so happy to learn about Mechanics Institute and I want to be uh supportive of you in the future. All right thank you and um Maurice I'll follow up. Thank you so much. Maurice I'll follow up soon with you okay take care. Okay all right bye-bye. Bye-bye.