CETE-P was very proud to host Maurice Hamington as a Visiting Scholar between 5 April and 12 April 2025. Maurice Hamington is Professor of Philosophy, and Affiliate Faculty in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Portland State University (USA). He is author and editor of more than a dozen of books in the field of moral and political theory of care. Maurice is a member of the Steering Committee of the Care Ethics Research Consortium (CERC).

On 8 April 2025, Maurice participated in a one-day workshop “Varieties of Care Theory in Central Europe” which featured work-in-progress of a dozen of scholars who work in care theory and are based at universities in Czechia and Slovakia (Košice, Olomouc, Brno, Pardubice, Prague). Maurice opened the workshop with his own work-in-progress presentation on the concept of ‘terrestrial care compact’. The topics of the workshop included more-than-human care in environmental contexts, crip care, or questions of democratic caring in fragmentized and polarized societies. The workshop took place in the lovely premises of the Center for Theoretical Study at the Institute of Philosophy CAS.

On 9 April 2025, Maurice gave a public lecture for a broader audience in the Café Husovka in which he presented the key arguments from his most recent book Revolutionary Care: Commitment and Ethos (Routledge 2024). He focused on the threefold structure of ‘good care’ as composed of humble inquiry, inclusive connection and responsive action and emphasised the need for a ‘care revolution’ in the current challenging time of a polycrisis. In the lively discussion after the lecture, Maurice tackled questions concerning the nature of the revolution he has in mind, normativity of ‘good care’, care-based argument for veganism, and much more.

In the rest of the week, Maurice met PhD researchers of CETE-P as well as two visiting PhD candidates from the University of Košice to give them feedback on their PhD projects. The visit of this leading care theorist helped the research community of CETE-P to better reflect on the role of relational feminist approaches in the context of environmental and technology ethics. It also gave an important impulse for advancing the collaboration between teams in Czechia and Slovakia which deploy a care ethics perspective in their research.

Photos: Romana Kovacs