This communication argues that education in care is a necessary element of emancipatory education. To this end, we engender a dialogue between recognition theory and critical pedagogy in light of the ethics of care. We conclude by arguing that an emancipatory education is an education that has relationships at its core and care as its foundation.

Cortina (2007) proposes that the notion of justice - as rights and duties - is insufficient for the society to reach its main ethical goals. This justice ethics need to be complemented by a cordial ethics, that emerges from the heart and established bonds that unite one person to the other, to their care and happiness: an ob-ligatio. The recognition of this ob-ligatio between people, and consequently acting based on care, would be the goals of an ethical education that’s coherent to our times.

Care paradigm determines that we are all part of one indivisible all and that, as a consequence, one’s ill is everyone’s ill. It proposes a care ethics: for the spiritual and material, the close and the distant, the recognised and the incomprehensible. And, for that, it is necessary we actively search for the Other.

For Levinas (2002), the existence of the Other is the condition for rationality. Without our relationship to the Other, we would be forever submerged in a bubble of selfishness, unable to access anything but our own equalities. The Other questions us and introduces to us what we did not know before. The Other also invites us to responsibility, to ethics.

Only by listening to the Other is it possible to build situated ethical practices, in which concrete decisions take into account contextual reality. Warren (according to Rosendo, 2012, p. 66) defends theory as a quilt, a single piece constructed by many hands from the union of different fabrics, which arrives at a unity. Grosfoguel also presents, in the same sense, the questioning walk of democracy of the Tojolabal people, where a concrete universalism is built from the inclusion of "the particular demands of all subjects and epistemes" (2007, p. 75).

Care ethics is a hot topic nowadays, especially after the appearance of global events that affect everyone's lives but especially the lives of vulnerable communities, such as climate change and the emergence of epidemics and pandemics. However, the relationship between ethics of care and education does not seem to be on the agenda yet, despite the fact that the need for a transformative education is already a common agenda.

Freire (1970) explains how conventional education is a form of cultural reproduction, of inculcating, for example, passivity through a banking form. The only way, for him, to create a transgressive, humanizing, and emancipatory education is by drastically changing the relationships established in the educational context: the person who educates, educates with, and never stops; he accomplishes his mission when the person being educated critically interprets the world and even his own educational process. 

Part of this inculcation, though, is that of a detached relationship to others. There is no way to think of human development without considering relationships, and that dehumanization is what takes the person out of the neutralizing and anesthetized state, of a "mere succession of instantaneous gifts that leave no marks" (Horkheimer & Adorno, cited in Ferrarese, 2021, p. 35, own translation). Care (Adorno, quoted in Ferrarese, 2021) is an attitude of breaking with the everydayness of barbarism.

bell hooks (2008), in other words, argues that love is what breaks the oppressive and colonizing dynamics of traditional education. An emancipatory education, therefore, is not only, but is necessarily, an education in care.

This paper is a part of a doctoral research about care and vulnerability. It aims to study the meaning structures of caring in vulnerability, as well as the meaning and significance of this phenomenon. For this, qualitative methodology will be used; specifically, the proposed method is Applied Hermeneutic Phenomenology. It is expected to extract conceptual contributions on the phenomenon studied, as well as methodological contributions on the use of the FHA and educational contributions for working with caregiving as vulnerable adolescents and/or young people, based on the experiences of vulnerable adolescents and young people. The first phase of the study, of practical phenomenology, has the general objective to give an account of the lived experience of caring in vulnerability. The second phase, of meta reflection of RRI, has the general objective to contribute to the application/reflection of the RRI (specifically in its ethical dimension). And the third phase, of meta reflection on practical phenomenology, has the general objective to contribute to the systematized reflection on the application of the applied hermeneutic phenomenological methodology (FHA). Currently, the project is in its first phase: clarifying the studied phenomenon, collecting lived experience descriptions and analyzing it through a phenomenological thematic analysis tool. This communication presents a part of the literature review on care and vulnerability, and an hermeneutic analysis of the main literature. Our objective was to find a relationship between care ethics, education in care and emancipatory education. We have summarized our findings in three topics: moral recognition as care; care as a basic human need; and care for emancipation.

Moral recognition as care According to Honneth, "human subjects can develop an intact self-relation only by virtue of being affirmed or recognized according to the value of certain capacities and rights" (2007, p. 138). The origin of social pathology, the key node of the problems we encounter as a society, lies in moral disrespect, or in other words, the lack of moral recognition of all subjects (Honneth, 2007). As explained by Houston and Dolan (2008), the actions that promote moral recognition in its three dimensions, and those actions are actually actions of care that enable people’s full development as subjects and members of a healthy society. Care as a basic human need Being-there, the human condition of always being and being already in the world, in relation to the environment, makes the natural condition of the human being subject to care, and it is necessary for the being to continue in care (Suassuna Martins Costa, 2006). The permanent attitude of care is a process of physical and spiritual remodeling, avoiding indifference, apathy or illness. From the ethics of care, we understand that care is what defines relationships in which concern for the Other and the relational are central and determine the actions to be taken. This concern for how bonds are formed is crucial for the development of individuals and of society. Care for emancipation Emancipation comes from latim ēmancipāre, giving independence to a child. Emancipation is an act of giving and maintaining freedom. In the same sense, to care is to act anticipating other’s needs to allow them their agency. Care is a basic human need, necessary for the full development of each person, and for a healthy society. Therefore, for education to be emancipatory, it has to be in care.

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