The Political Economy of Care

For over a century, policymakers, researchers, and civil society activists have wrestled with the vexing problem of how to ascribe value to the time, labor, attention, and expertise required to provide care. These labors include the vast amount of physical, mental, and emotional exertion that sustain not only households and dependents but also communities and environments. The concept of care labors and care economies extend to questions such as sex, work, surrogacy, infrastructure, and food production. These labors are performed in uncommodified, semi-commodified, and hyper-commodified forms – i.e., ranging from household chores to platform economies – often by the same people. They involve everyone from household members to international migrant laborers. The failure to account for these labors in official metrics such as Gross Domestic Product or the System of National Accounts has, since the 1960s, been widely identified as one of the most consistent impediments to improving women’s status. Still, the only solution proposed have centered on the commodification of these labors – either through the private sector or through state-run wlefare programs – or hopes that technology will resolve what has been called a “crisis of care” without creating additional care burdens.

This seminar will orient researchers in some of the major debates within the literature on care economies and care labor and consider how these issues intersect with dynamics such as migration, commodification, and quantification, with particular attention to the ways that ideation of race and gender shape these dynamics.