{"title":"Solicitude and Solitude: Care, Ethics, and the Vulnerability of Front-Line Social Work in the US.","authors":"Todd Ebling, Thomas Malaby","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2024.2431722","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The moral terrain of caring in a social work context is often treacherous. During ethnographic fieldwork with front-line workers at an organization providing services for unhoused individuals in a U.S. city, respondents articulated a relational intimacy required in client care. However, they also recognized the limits of their endurance and their need for distance from others. In this article, we suggest that Paul Ricoeur's \"little ethics,\" in contrast to first-person or poststructuralist approaches to ethics, captures these workers' experience more fully and allows us to see the forging and negotiation of moral relationships of care and shared vulnerability more clearly.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"1-13"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5000,"publicationDate":"2024-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Medical Anthropology","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2024.2431722","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"ANTHROPOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The moral terrain of caring in a social work context is often treacherous. During ethnographic fieldwork with front-line workers at an organization providing services for unhoused individuals in a U.S. city, respondents articulated a relational intimacy required in client care. However, they also recognized the limits of their endurance and their need for distance from others. In this article, we suggest that Paul Ricoeur's "little ethics," in contrast to first-person or poststructuralist approaches to ethics, captures these workers' experience more fully and allows us to see the forging and negotiation of moral relationships of care and shared vulnerability more clearly.
期刊介绍:
Medical Anthropology provides a global forum for scholarly articles on the social patterns of ill-health and disease transmission, and experiences of and knowledge about health, illness and wellbeing. These include the nature, organization and movement of peoples, technologies and treatments, and how inequalities pattern access to these. Articles published in the journal showcase the theoretical sophistication, methodological soundness and ethnographic richness of contemporary medical anthropology. Through the publication of empirical articles and editorials, we encourage our authors and readers to engage critically with the key debates of our time. Medical Anthropology invites manuscripts on a wide range of topics, reflecting the diversity and the expanding interests and concerns of researchers in the field.