The Latin American Care Turn: Rights, Regional Governance, and the Politics of Policy Diffusion

CARE IN COMMON — Call for Papers

February 11–13, 2027 | Duke University | Hybrid workshop
English and Spanish with simultaneous interpretation

Keynote speaker: Laura Pautassi

What changes when care is recognized as a human right? Across Latin America and the Caribbean, feminist movements, care workers, scholars, legal advocates, and public institutions have brought care into debates over rights, work, social protection, and public responsibility. Yet legal recognition raises further questions: who can claim this right, who must guarantee it, and what institutions and resources make it effective?

Revaluing Care in the Global Economy invites proposals for a workshop at Duke University and a related issue of Care in Common, a new interdisciplinary, open-access journal on care and care work. We seek contributions examining how care becomes a regional legal and policy norm, how that norm travels across institutions and borders, and how it reshapes the organization of care.

The workshop takes as points of departure the Inter-American Court of Human Rights’ advisory opinion on the right to care, ECLAC’s Regional Gender Agenda and Buenos Aires Commitment, the OAS/CIM Inter-American Model Law on Care, and ILO frameworks on decent work and care work. Laura Pautassi, the principal architect of the strategic litigation which led to the IACHR’s recognition of the Human Right to Care, will deliver the keynote address. National care systems, constitutional jurisprudence, and municipal initiatives provide further sites for examining how rights are interpreted and put into practice. We approach Latin America and the Caribbean as a region producing legal and political ideas that can inform broader debates on care and human rights.

Themes and questions

We welcome theoretical, empirical, historical, comparative, and practice-informed contributions. Topics may include:

• The right to provide care, receive care, and exercise self-care in human rights law, constitutional law, legislation, and judicial decisions; legal mobilization and strategic litigation.
• The production and circulation of care norms through regional organizations, feminist and labor movements, care-worker organizations, expert networks, and domestic institutions.
• National care systems and policy diffusion, including how institutional models, rights language, and financing arrangements are adapted, contested, or narrowed across contexts.

• The translation of care rights into services, budgets, and institutions, including municipal and territorial initiatives such as Bogotá’s Manzanas del Cuidado.
• Paid and unpaid care work, domestic work, labor formalization, parental and care leave, social protection, and the use of time-use evidence in policy design.
• The distributional effects and limits of care frameworks, including inequalities of gender, race, class, disability, age, migration status, and territory; political backlash and the durability of reforms.

Across these themes, we ask: Under what conditions does recognition change access to care, time, income, autonomy, and decent work? Whose claims and knowledge shape care institutions, and whose remain excluded? What explains the movement of particular policies across borders—and what happens to their transformative ambitions along the way?

We welcome contributions across law, human rights, feminist political economy, sociology, anthropology, political science, labor studies, public policy, Latin American and Caribbean studies, and related fields. Scholars, practitioners, care-worker organizations, and advocates are encouraged to submit work that connects research with legal, policy, or organizing experience. Single-country and local studies are welcome when they illuminate the workshop’s broader questions.

How to submit

For research papers, please submit a title, an abstract of 300–400 words outlining the question, approach, and contribution, a bibliography of up to five entries, and a short biography of up to 100 words. Include your name, affiliation (if any), contact information, submission language, and preferred mode of participation (in person or online). Full research articles are expected to be approximately 8,000–10,000 words, including notes and references.

Practitioners, advocates, and care-worker organizations interested in the practitioner panel may submit a 300–400-word proposal describing the experience, initiative, or policy question they would bring to the discussion, together with a short individual or organizational biography. Presentations in this session can take various forms; an academic paper is not required.

The related volume of Care in Common will bring invited framing contributions into conversation with research selected through this open call. Authors submitting research proposals should intend to develop their papers for the volume. Workshop selection does not guarantee publication: research articles will undergo double-blind peer review. Submissions may be written in English or Spanish, and the full volume will be published in both languages.

Proposal deadline: 21 December 2026
Notification of selection: 4 January 2027
Workshop paper deadline: 29 January 2027
Revised manuscript deadline: 1 June 2027 — articles will be published as they are ready for publication
Submissions and inquiries: RevaluingCareLab@duke.edu