Session 6: Recasting Love, Self and Otherness
Chair: Christopher Swader


Global Caring: Rethinking the Relationship between Self and Other
Sara de Jong
Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice, School of Politics and IR, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom

In an era of increasing interconnectedness in which globalisation functions as a homogenising force as well as affecting people unequally and hence increasing social and economic disparities, it is imperative to consider the moral relationship between individuals in the Global North and the Global South. While many charities and NGOs express demands for a global responsibility towards the distant other, their rhetoric often appeals to self-interest and invokes the colonial legacy with notions of imperial benevolence.
This paper will analyse calls for a global responsibility and uncover the ambivalent messages of empowering distant others, while simultaneously keeping them in a dependent position. I will argue that in order to transcend this discourse we need to radically rethink the relation between Self and (distant) Other and (borrowing from respectively Spivak and Minh-ha) begin to reconceptualise our relation to alterity with the notions of ‘planetarity’ and ‘inappropriate(d) Other’. Direct or mediated encounters with distant others challenge the position of the Self and relinquishing one’s fixed notions of Self and otherness can lead to feelings of anxiety. Furthermore, recognition of one’s complicity in the situation and status of the Other can result in a paralysing feeling of culpability. Using postcolonial and moral theory the possibility of a ‘constructive complicity’ will be explored as a counterpart to mere negative complicity by attempting to trace and address the roots of the anxieties that can hinder global caring. The paper will conclude by arguing that this constructive complicity might provide the minimal foundation of a moral imperative to care for distant others.

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Intimacy as a Threat to the Self
Jessica Mjöberg
Department of Sociology, Uppsala University, Sweden

No abstract is presently available