Our impacts outweigh and clash can’t turn them. You should prioritize debate’s caring incentives over its competitive ones. Debating their epistemological underpinnings is necessary.

Capitalism, and especially the capitalist economy, may be hegemonic, but it is not monolithic and incontestable. In order to develop new concepts, new understandings of resistance to social injustices we must move outside the frame of the master’s house of capitalism and capitalist ethics especially in higher education. It is time to recognise that care is a fundamental value within education and that students themselves prioritise care and public service values; they see their education as helping them to realise these goals. It is time for higher education to move out of the ‘master’s house’ of neoliberal capitalism, and all that it entails, when education is built on such a narrow instrumentalist view of society.

Taking affective equality seriously is not only about how staff and student carers are facilitated and encouraged in higher education, but also about how curricula in higher education are made care- and social justice-focused, in both human and environmental terms. It is time for the ethics of care, equality and social justice to replace the ethics of capitalism in the academy. As Tronto (2017: 28) has observed, people are self-preoccupied, and they act as self-interested rational economic actors (homo economicus), but they do not always act from this motivation; people are also caring, homines curans (caring people). The will to care and show concern for others is as real a psycho-socio-political phenomenon as competitive self-interest. However, care for others needs to be nurtured through education and social practice if it is to survive as a cultural phenomenon.

Research and teaching priorities that are driven by academic capitalism (Slaughter and Leslie, 2001; O’Hagan et al., 2019), and an educational system that undermines respect for care through implementing neoliberal managerialist practices (Lynch, 2010; Lynch et al., 2012), cannot enable or resource people to think with care, or to think how to create an egalitarian and caring society. To develop care-centric thinking there is a need to rethink the epistemology underpinning academic scholarship (Medina, 2013; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012), because how we come to know impacts on what we know, and what we do with what we know. Creating knowledge is a relational practice (Harding, 1991), and how we do it impacts also on the known other. There is a need to move beyond the idea of science and research as a means of controlling nature (and other peoples), to the idea of science and scholarship as a site of learning through cooperation. This means working as equals with other scholars, with those who are experts-throughexperience, with nature and with non-human animals, with a view to arriving at a mutual understanding, driven by concerns for social, species and environmental justice, and an ethic of care.

Speaking out about carelessness and affective equality is not easy, as, like women’s experience of sexual intimidation, it lacks a name that is claimable and knowable (Fricker, 2007). Under neoliberalism the world of care provisioning remains ‘divested of a place in language’. It is visually and discursively absent from public consciousness (Brown, 2015: 104–107), but this is not inevitable.

If an ethics of care and social, species and environmental justice is to develop, effective communication has to take place, ‘publics have to be formed and to become able to express themselves; and social sensibilities of openness have to be cultivated for those publics to be listened to and responded to properly’ (Medina, 2013: 9).14 For carers and those in need of care to be heard, providing political spaces, and education and resources for the development of care movements is essential. People need to be given the conceptual and analytical tools to think about and with the world differently, and to be enabled and resourced to organise around this thinking and knowing.

Just as we need to counter hate speech with education (Verma and Apple, 2020), so we need to educate people in cooperative caring ways to create a different world (Noddings, 1984; Lynch et al., 2007). It will not happen by accident. It has always surprised me that we expect young people leaving school and college to be anything other than self-interested and self-preoccupied. As a study I undertook over 30 years ago showed (The Hidden Curriculum; Lynch, 1989), throughout their schooling, students are highly rewarded for engaging successfully in individualised competitions for grades and ranks. They are punished, in status and recognition terms, if they do not play the self-entrepreneurial game.

An education that does not educate about love, care and solidarity or social justice, and/or that undermines respect for care, social justice and cooperation in its daily practice due to its intense individualised competitiveness at formative stages of life cannot enable or resource young people to think and act with care. Altruism does not ‘fall from the sky’ (Folbre, 1994: 250); it has to be learned and practised, reinforced culturally and politically, and economically resourced. Education, including cultural and political education in local communities, is central to the initiation of that process.