Reflections on the Concomitants of the Restrictive Visitation Policy During the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Ubuntu Perspective

Caregiving is a prominent concept in the Ubuntu philosophy, and caring and visitation of the sick is regarded as an example of Ubuntu. The restrictive visitation policy adopted in the hospitals during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic affected the exhibition of this concept among patients, nurses, and families. The narrative inquiry was used to explore the reflections of the participants on the impact caused by the non-visitation policy experienced during the first and second waves of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa. The narrative inquiry approach allowed the participants to tell their story as it is unique to them. The study used purposive sampling technique to select five participants for the webinar. Three themes emerged from the narrated stories which are 1) moral anguish of the caregivers; 2) mental health instability, and 3) erosion of trust in health care practitioners (HCPs). The non-visitation hospital policy was intended to reduce the danger of spreading COVID-19 within and outside the hospital; however, the care provided was devoid of the values of Ubuntu such as mutual respect, relational, responsibility, reciprocity, and interconnectedness. In retrospect, a case-by-case application of the policy would reduce the non-desirable effect of the policy on the patients, nurses, and patients' family members.

Narrative responsibility and artificial intelligence

Most accounts of responsibility focus on one type of responsibility, moral responsibility, or address one particular aspect of moral responsibility such as agency. This article outlines a broader framework to think about responsibility that includes causal responsibility, relational responsibility, and what I call “narrative responsibility” as a form of “hermeneutic responsibility”, connects these notions of responsibility with different kinds of knowledge, disciplines, and perspectives on human being, and shows how this framework is helpful for mapping and analysing how artificial intelligence (AI) challenges human responsibility and sense-making in various ways. Mobilizing recent hermeneutic approaches to technology, the article argues that next to, and interwoven with, other types of responsibility such as moral responsibility, we also have narrative and hermeneutic responsibility—in general and for technology. For example, it is our task as humans to make sense of, with and, if necessary, against AI. While from a posthumanist point of view, technologies also contribute to sense-making, humans are the experiencers and bearers of responsibility and always remain in charge when it comes to this hermeneutic responsibility. Facing and working with a world of data, correlations, and probabilities, we are nevertheless condemned to make sense. Moreover, this also has a normative, sometimes even political aspect: acknowledging and embracing our hermeneutic responsibility is important if we want to avoid that our stories are written elsewhere—through technology.

Global Social Witnessing: An Educational Tool for Awareness-Based Systems Change in the Era of Global Humanitarian and Planetary Crisis

‘Global social witnessing’ was originally proposed by Hübl and Ury (2017) and was developed as a practice of “contemplative social cognition” (Singer et al., 2015). Though ‘global social witnessing’ is applied in various contexts by group facilitators of contemplative practice (Cmind, 2014), the concept has not yet been subjected to thorough research and has not yet arrived at a common scientific understanding and definition, which needs to be addressed throughout the research methodology of applying this concept. This paper aims to propose ‘global social witnessing’ as an educational tool for awareness-based systems change by highlighting its philosophical and psychological foundations in search of its ethical implications for bearing witness, a term often used in psychotherapy (Orange, 2017). This body of work draws on Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of relational responsibility, and focuses on transformative, systemic learning. As a consequence, this exploration will hopefully generate further research questions that can serve as focal points for interdisciplinary projects of awareness-based systems change (e.g., philosophy, sociology, psychology, education, neuroscience, and physics).

Autoethnography: A Potential Method for Sikh Theory to Praxis Research

The application of autoethnographic research as an investigative methodology in Sikh studies may appear relatively novel. Yet the systematic analysis in autoethnography of a person’s experience through reflexivity and connecting the personal story to the social, cultural, and political life has synergy with the Sikh sense-making process. Deliberation (vichhar) of an individual’s experience through the embodied wisdom of the Gurū (gurmat) connecting the lived experience to a greater knowing and awareness of the self is an established practice in Sikhi. This article explores autoethnography as a potential research method to give an academic voice to and capture the depth of the lived experiences of Sikhs: first, by articulating the main spaces of synergy of autoethnography with gurmat vichhar; second, discussing common themes such as inclusivity of disregarded voices, accessibility to knowledge creation, relational responsibility, and integrity in storytelling common to both autoethnography and gurmat vichhar. In conclusion, the autoethnographic approach has the means to illuminate nuances in understanding Sikhi that is transformative and familiar to the ancestral process of how Sikhs have made sense of themselves and the world around them.

Vigilant care: constructive dialogues and relational responsibility in violent contexts

This is a qualitative exploratory study by the “Assistance and Vigilance Research Program on Violence”, focusing on a group of seven sexual abuse survivors and their mothers. The study’s objective is to develop a caretaker protocol for Parent Vigilant Care. Observers register protocol sessions by themes evolving within the action group. The information is organized into categories: 1) Hidden pain, 2) Caring is protecting, and 3) Breaking through isolation. Observation and conclusions focus on the following: 1) The disconnect revealed by mothers and daughters on the role of mothers in their daughters’ lives, 2) The potential for recovery of affective relationships, 3) Respect development for a horizontal or equalization of power, 4) The return or rescue of a mother’s competency and authority.

Toward Systemic Transformation in Education

In this conclusion, the authors consider steps toward systemic transformation in education. They offer proposals for relation-enriching actions in the classroom, the whole school, the community, higher education institutions, and beyond. In the classroom, the authors emphasize the art of inquiring, the art of listening, the art of appreciation, and the art of disagreeing; in the whole school, they advocate a relational ethos and the development of a culture of inquiry and collaboration, participative decision-making, and relational responsibility; in the community, they propose that parents should be co-learners and co-authors of the educational narrative and that neighborhood institutions should serve as school’s learning partners; in the case of higher education institutions, the authors stress these institutions’ role in expanding students’ learning and supporting teachers’ professional development. Finally, the authors point out that a systemic transformation in education invites a globally shared inquiry into new ways living together.

‘I don’t clean up after myself’: epistemic ignorance, responsibility and the politics of the outsourcing of domestic cleaning

In this article, I propose to look at the organisation of reproductive labour in the ‘global North’ through a lens of epistemic ignorance. Focusing on the process of outsourcing, I argue that it creates forms of irresponsibility, and with it, epistemic ignorance. The devaluation of domestic work and the degradation of domestic workers is shaped by gendered and colonial ideologies, and Western epistemologies. These epistemologies underpin a strong subject/object split and buffer the denial of existing interdependencies. I problematise those epistemologies by drawing on feminist care ethics, accounts of relational selves and relational responsibility, and alternative epistemologies. Grounding that discussion on vignettes from an in-depth study of heterosexual couples in Austrian households who outsource domestic work, I argue that the systematic failure to see what and who we are connected to in the domestic realm is shaped by gendered and racialised privilege, and driven by an epistemology of separation. My argument will unfold in two steps. First, I use the concept of the skin as an example of how the beliefs in an independent, autonomous self and a strong subject/object split disguise connectedness and relationality. This leads me to the second step, in which I explicate my notion of semipermeable membranes – a thinking together of ontological permeability and ethical responsiveness. I argue that active forms of ‘unknowing’ at work in ‘mundane,’ everyday, domestic performances have far-reaching consequences.