A Feminist Care Ethics Toolkit for Community-Based Design: Bridging Theory and Practice

Existing ethics frameworks for participatory engagement in HCI often overlook the nuanced ethical challenges of dynamic community-based contexts given the latter’s relational nature. We hope to bridge this gap by grounding feminist care ethics in actionable tools for community-based projects to enhance ethical engagement in these settings. Prior research advocates for adaptable, context-sensitive ethics in participatory research, informed by feminist care ethics. To address this need, we developed and iteratively refined a toolkit embodying the underlying principles of feminist care ethics through workshops with participants working in academic and non-academic community-based settings. Our findings suggest that the toolkit fosters ethical reflection aligned with the feminist care ethics ethos while facilitating meaningful experiences for participants. This work contributes to the field by offering a practical design artefact that not only embodies feminist care ethics but also supports researchers and communities in navigating complex ethical landscapes in participatory engagements, together or independently.