While concepts of care and caring have a long history, the terms have become especially prominent in recent times. Care and caring, I argue, have emerged as what philosopher Charles Taylor calls ‘moral sources,’ uber-concepts that allow for moral deliberation, the prioritization of preferences, and our identity formation as persons. Linking the current salience of care to a growing awareness of the dynamics of a crisis- and catastrophe-ridden world, I consider care within the context of university students’ declining mental health. (...) Acknowledging role differentiation within universities and the contributions of Well-being units with specialist knowledge, I contend that frontline tutors without such knowledge have an important role to play in developing alternatives to an increasingly pervasive medicalised conception of care, one that constitutes students as passive patients. Drawing on Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Zen’s capabilities approach to human flourishing, I suggest that there is considerable scope, within the civil society environments of the university sector, for life skills-oriented practices of care that are profoundly agential, and, through this, curative, protective, and liberating. I illustrate the relevance of the theoretical propositions through a case study of a collaborative performance of the ‘Shout at Cancer Choir’ (aka ‘Laryngectomy Choir’) at the University of Lincoln, UK, in 2023. The aim is to show how particular forms of community engagement, within or beyond the formal curriculum, create capabilities-based conditions for students’ flourishing. (shrink)

This article interrogates twelve step practice within Alcoholics Anonymous from the perspective of Foucault’s later work on governance, truth-telling and subjectivity. Recent critical studies of addiction tend to view self-help cultures like that of AA and related twelve step programs as integral parts of contemporary power/knowledge complexes, and thus as agents of the modern “will to knowledge” that Foucault often engages with. In line with the widespread Foucauldian critique of governmentality, addiction self-help culture is thus conceived as one that primarily (...) reproduces abstract, neoliberal norms on health and subjectivity. The argument put forward in this article aims to upset this framework attending to a number of features of twelve step practice that, arguably, bear striking resemblances to Foucault’s later discussions of ethics, care of self and truth-telling. In this, it is suggested that a close study of AA practices, might interrupt assumptions about contemporary addiction discourse and its relationship to issues of truth and power often reproduced in Foucauldian critiques. (shrink)

It has often been argued that Foucault’s turn to antique and early Christian care of the self, spiritual self-.practices and truth-telling (parrhesia) results from inquiries into the confession practices and pastoral power structures in the context of a genealogy of the desiring subject. This line of reasoning is in itself not incorrect, but – this article claims – needs to be complemented with an account of Foucault’s philosophical quest for freedom and for conditions, possibilities and modes of thinking and acting (...) differently vis-à-vis the normalizing regimes of power in science and, hence, in philosophy as an academic discipline. In this context a first turn to antique philosophy seen as a ‘way of life’ constructed through ascetic practices can be detected already writings from the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although indeed the project of the history of sexuality moved in a direction than Foucault had foreseen in the first volume published in 1976, earlier reflections on the need for free and critical philosophical thought relative to scientific ‘disciplines’ already prelude the later inquiries into care of the self, self-practices and parrhesia as productive for a critical philosophical attitude. (shrink)