Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This paper explores how engaging relationally with ocean life might expand ethical sensibilities beyond human-centered paradigms, offering new ways of thinking about responsibility, care, and justice in social work. Drawing on the work of scholars such as Karen Barad, Vinciane Despret, Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing, we argue for moving beyond binaries, rendering each other capable and orienting through care-full listening – forms of ethical engagement that recognise the deep entanglements between human and more-than-human worlds. By examining the queer practices of hermaphrodite sea hares, the mutuality of topological fish cleaning stations, and the echolocative call and response of toothed whales, we explore how oceanic ways of being and becoming invite a reimagining of ethics as relational, dynamic, and co-constitutive. These examples challenge social work’s foundational commitments to rights-based frameworks and anthropocentric justice, proposing instead an ethics attuned to multispecies entanglements, vulnerability, and interdependence. A more-than-human ethics opens space for rethinking care and accountability in ways that challenge principle ethics in social work.
Source: Ethics and Social Welfare
Authors: Vivienne Bozalek, Michalinos Zembylas
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Life below water
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4414428281