Entangling care and justice in practice: The Case of volunteers working with homeless populations in Buenos Aires

Emmanouela is Associate Professor of Organizations at NEOMA Business School. In her research, Emmanouela explores dynamics and asymmetries between cognitive and corporeal factors shaping ethical and affective inter-personal interactions in social and organizational contexts, including methods of academic research and writing, to provide alternative perspectives to her subjects of inquiry. She analyses these dynamics to explore questions of gender, inclusion and inequalities in organizations.

Abstract:

Adding to business ethics literature, often positioning care and justice in opposition, this study draws on a 24-month ethnography with a civic organization serving homeless populations in Buenos Aires to explore how these principles converge in practice. Introducing the concept of situated justice as care for the other of the other, we bring Levinasian ethics into organizational contexts, showing how fairness is grounded in situated encounters yet remains accountable to (third) others. Our analysis identifies two interrelated processes: embodied awareness of the other and relational evaluation of needs and resources, through which care and justice are dynamically and contextually interdependent rather than mutually exclusive.

This event is organized as a collaboration between The Center for Imagining and Co-Creating Futures, and the open urban seminar series at the Department of Urban Studies.

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