In this book, Marian Barnes and Tula Brannelly provide some guidance to researchers who wish to use care ethics as a guide to their research. As will become quickly apparent, this is not another book about research methods. Indeed, it is almost a book against such methods. As the American political theorist Sheldon Wolin warned, more than 50 years ago, even to think about ‘methods’ as the way to approach knowledge starts with some presumptions about the world:

In the ensuing decades, the quest for ‘methods’ has made the short path towards ‘research’ ever the more well-trodden. Every graduate student must now take at least one course in research methods, and scholars delight in producing tomes that make such lists. Throughout the leading institutions and processes of academia that today inform the global practices of research, a consensus seems to exist that good research can be measured by such markers of academic success as number of articles or books published, number of citations, and ranking journals and presses based on their popularity with other similarly situated researchers. The whole system seems to reinforce Wolin’s concern that recreating and reflecting what is predictable and normal is the main purpose for scholarly work.

The view of research presented here starts with a different premise and ends up elsewhere. It marks what Thomas Kuhn (1970) first called a paradigm change: a different approach to research. What marks this paradigm change for Brannelly and Barnes is that they begin from the premise that research should be done with care.