PhD Courses in Denmark

Course content

Care ethics has informed research in several areas, such as care work, leadership, organisations, work-life, spaces and cities. This Ph.D. course invites students for a cross-disciplinary theoretical and methodological exploration of how care becomes relevant as an organising and work-life principle, raising important ethical questions related to social and societal change.

Care ethics in an organising perspective emphasizes relationality and interdependence as central principles: it reframes organising and organizations not as collections of discrete economic actors governed by rules and transactions but as networks of caring practices that shape wellbeing for people, communities, and more-than-human environments.

From this starting point, care ethics asks both normative and empirical questions about what organisations and professional practices should aim for (e.g. sustainability, welfare, social change) and how they actually produce - or fail to produce -attentive, accountable relations of care, that are socially, ecologically sustainable both for staff, leaders, end-users and nature through leadership and professional practices.

The approach is explicitly political and situated: Who counts as a cared-for subject? Which responsibilities are recognized? And which practices and resources are always socio-political matters – meaning how particular practices and ressources are recognized as legitimate and worthy of attention, what Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) calls “matters of care”. At the same time, care ethics unsettles standard moral frameworks (e.g. rule-based or utility-based ethics) by privileging contextual responsiveness, emotion, and embodied relations as moral resources (not mere obstacles) in work and organizing.

Historically care ethics was formulated in opposition to the dominant traditions of Western ethics s uch as utilitarian ethics, ethics of duty and virtue ethics. Ethics of care sees the human being as deeply relational, connected and embedded in social relations and claims that the idea of the independent, autonomous subject is a construction which stresses human interdependency with other humans and nature. Feminist thinkers have argued that traditional Western ethics privileges a male socialisation and way of being in the world, in which the male subject is free of responsibilities for other living creatures, and where societal conditions imply that an individualistic, self-interested and independent subject forms the ideal and standard for ethical norms. Following this line of thought ethics can be embedded in formal rights, whereas feminist ethics place closeness, care and responsiveness at the centre of ethical considerations.

This PhD course explores care ethics as:

(a) a theoretical lens for rethinking moral concepts and organizational purpose and practices;

(b) a methodological stance that shapes research design, data collection and intervention; and

(c) a practical framework for diagnosing and redesigning organizational practices across sectors and themes (e.g., leadership, work conditions, agriculture, urban planning, health and eldercare, disability services, environmental governance).

We pay special attention to tensions - power asymmetries, resource constraints, institutional norms, professional cultures - that complicate the translation of care ideals into organizational practice. The course combines conceptual readings with sectoral case studies and methodological workshops so students can both analyse and prototype care-led organizational interventions and action research.