Building an outline was a good first challenge toward a theoretical framework for my ENVS thesis. I am working next on filling this out with full text and that will serve as the first section of my full thesis draft.
I worked with three sections—Care & Feminist ethics, Modernity, Public Sphere—and still have not figured out what argument will weave the three sections together so as not to sound one then the next.
I’ve drawn some text from the outline below to give examples of how I’m summarizing to prepare for more drafting in future:
Care & Feminist ethics
I situate my discussion of care within feminist and ecofeminist ethics (via weaving, e.g. with theory I engage on the public sphere). I give a brief review of feminist and ecofeminist thought on logics of domination. I review the seminal arguments for an “ethics of care” that position care as a feminine ethic outside of a masculine ethic of justice. I engage an array of later contributions to critique actors of care as beyond givers/receivers, consider how gender affects the use of theory of care, and especially consider how a few of these sources specifically put an ethics of care into conversation with questions of politics. Somewhere in this section, it is also important to mention other approaches (not within feminist ethics) to environmental ethics I reviewed, e.g., de-Shalit’s “communitarian theory of intergenerational justice (de-Shalit 1995). The above sets me up for a theoretical synthesis in section 1.4; by the end of the full top of hourglass framework I develop my own contribution to a broader question and theoretical body of environmental ethics via concepts of care.
More to come!
