About

 

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Origins and Rationale

Care in Common emerges from the work of Revaluing Care in the Global Economy, an international, interdisciplinary research network launched in 2019 and based at Duke University. The network was founded on a straightforward but far-reaching observation: despite decades of research, data collection, and advocacy, care work remains deeply undervalued across the world, and its burdens fall with persistent and unjust disproportionality on women — especially women from marginalized racial and ethnic communities. Conventional responses, whether state-led, market-driven, or technological, have done little to alter this fundamental reality. Even modest policy reforms remain stubbornly difficult to secure.

Care in Common starts from the premises that social, cultural, and ecological care are all imbricated and interdependent and that we need to look beyond this standard repertoire of solutions to what has been dubbed a crisis of care.  To that end, we seek to foster a conversation among researchers, practitioners, activists, educators, and artists.

Since its founding, the Revaluing Care network has grown into a genuinely global community of scholars, practitioners, and artists spanning multiple continents and disciplines. Its programming includes a working-papers seminar, the Care Talk blog, exhibitions, a podcast, collaborative events on six continents, and a researcher directory and bibliography that serve as open resources for the broader field.

Through this work, we have recognized the need to launch an open-access journal to serve as a venue to develop the field of Care Studies through question-driven rather than discipline-driven inquiry.  Because many researchers in this field are committed to open-access research and because the increasing importance of AI-based scoping makes open access more prominent, we are committed to maintaining this journal as an open-access publication.

Care in Common is the journal of the Revaluing Care network and an open invitation to the wider community of people who share its commitments. It exists to create a durable, freely accessible record of the most original work being produced on care: rigorous scholarly research, knowledge born of practice and organizing, and creative work that both bears witness to and defamiliarizes our understandings of care.

Statement of Purpose

The founding premise of this journal is that care is not a private or domestic matter. It is a common concern that lies at the heart of how societies sustain themselves, distribute resources, manage vulnerability, and imagine justice. The questions the journal takes up are questions that touch every life, such as: Who does care work? Under what conditions and for what compensation? Who decides what counts as care and what it is worth? How are the boundaries of communities of care described and policed?  How do states, markets, communities, and households organize the giving and receiving of care?  What is the relationship between the nurturing and supporting aspects of care and its disciplining and surveilling aspects?

A second founding premise is that social, cultural, and ecological care are not separate domains but deeply entangled. The direct labor of sustaining persons across the life course; the practices through which communities transmit memory, language, and meaning; and the work of tending the living systems on which all human life depends: these are bound together in practice even when they are siloed into theory, policy, law, and economics. Care in Common takes that imbrication not as a theoretical flourish but as an analytical and political commitment and a condition for understanding why care is undervalued, who bears the cost of that devaluation, and what a genuine politics of revaluation would require.

These questions require and reward multiple forms of inquiry. The Revaluing Care network brings together scholars, activists, and practitioners on the grounds that knowledge about care is produced not only in research and theory but also in the accumulated expertise of those who provide care, organize care workers, and advocate for care as a right. The journal carries that commitment into publication.

Care in Common is also committed to the global character of these questions. Care arrangements are shaped by histories of colonialism and enslavement; by the unequal geography of paid and unpaid work; by national and international migration regimes; and by the differential distribution of vulnerability across race, class, gender, citizenship, and geography. No account of care that remains within a single national context can capture this. The journal actively seeks work that crosses borders and that names the asymmetries that structure care at every scale, from the household to the international economy.

Scope and Themes

The journal's thematic scope is shaped by the three research pillars of the Revaluing Care in the Global Economy network:

• Metrics — how care is (and is not) measured, and how measurement itself constitutes care and how it is valued
• Governance — how laws, policies, and institutions both reflect and constitute the normative values regarding care
• Social Practices — how specific forms of community, organization, and collective life inform and transform care, and how those formations are shaped by dynamics of class, race, gender, and citizenship

Within and across these pillars, the journal welcomes work on: the conditions and compensation of paid and unpaid care workers; care and social reproduction; feminist, queer, decolonial, and disability perspectives on care ethics and politics; care across the life course; care and migration; environmental and ecological care; the political economy and political ecology of care; care cooperativism and solidarity economies; care as resistance and collective practice; and the cultural and aesthetic dimensions of care. We are pluralistic in theoretical commitments and deliberately interdisciplinary.

The interdependence of social, cultural, and ecological care remains among the most undertheorized dimensions of care scholarship. The three forms of care are not merely analogous or adjacent; they are structurally entangled in ways that become visible only when they are studied together.

Social care: the direct work of sustaining persons across the life course: feeding, nursing, educating, accompanying — is most visible in policy debate and tends to organize discussions of care labor, care deficits, and care systems. Yet it is never purely social: it depends on living ecologies and is saturated with cultural meaning.

Cultural care: the transmission of memory, language, ceremony, craft, and relation across generations and within communities — is less often framed as care at all, even though it is continuous with the labor of social reproduction and equally subject to devaluation and crisis. The destruction of cultural care — through colonial schooling, displacement, assimilation policy, and the defunding of arts and humanities — is a care crisis, and it is not separable from the crises of social and ecological care that accompany it.

Ecological care: the tending of soils, waterways, seed varieties, forests, animals, and the broader living systems on which all human life depends — has historically been performed disproportionately by the same communities, often the same women, who bear the heaviest burdens of social and cultural care. The appropriation and degradation of ecosystems fall hardest on those already most exposed; ecological dispossession is also a dispossession of the conditions that make social and cultural care possible.

The journal particularly welcomes submissions that refuse to treat these as separate registers and that illuminate their structural entanglement: work that asks how communities organize care for the living world alongside care for living people; that examines how cultural practices encode ecological knowledge and ethics of relationship; that traces how climate crisis, extractivism, and ecological breakdown compound existing care deficits, even as they often fund welfare policies; and that attends to the movements — Indigenous, feminist, peasant, environmental — that have already explored these connections.

Structure of Each Issue

Each issue of Care in Common comprises three sections, each representing a distinct but interconnected form of knowledge and expression.

I.  Refereed Articles

The first section publishes original scholarly articles that have undergone double-blind peer review. We welcome empirical research, theoretical contributions, comparative studies, and methodological interventions across disciplines. Articles typically run between 8,000 and 10,000 words, including notes and references.

Reviewers are asked to evaluate submissions on the quality of the argument, the significance of the contribution, and the clarity of the writing rather than conformity to any single disciplinary convention. The journal editors are committed to working constructively with early-career and underrepresented scholars whose manuscripts show promise and require further development. We particularly welcome work that is methodologically innovative, that crosses disciplinary lines, or that challenges prevailing frameworks in care research.

II.  Writings from Practitioners and Activists

The second section is a dedicated space for those whose primary engagement with care is practical and political. The Revaluing Care network has always held that the most important knowledge about care is not only produced in universities. This section seeks contributions from care workers and their unions and organizations, community organizers, policy advocates, healthcare professionals, social workers, educators, parents and family caregivers, disability activists, and others working at the frontlines of care. Collaborative submissions written across organizational or professional lines are particularly welcome.

Contributions are reviewed by the editorial collective together with members of the journal's practitioner advisory panel. They need not follow scholarly conventions of citation or argumentation. We seek clarity of purpose, authenticity of experience and analysis, and a genuine contribution to collective understanding. Submissions may take the form of essays, accounts of specific campaigns or policy struggles, organizational histories, collective statements, or interviews. Length is flexible, typically between 1,500 and 5,000 words.

III.  Creative Materials

The third section publishes poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, visual art, photography, graphic work, and experimental forms that engage care as their subject or that emerge from the experience of giving and receiving it. This commitment reflects a conviction that runs through the Revaluing Care network's work — visible in projects such as the “Visualizing Care” exhibition and the “Photovoice, Care, and Loneliness” project — that aesthetic and literary work does intellectual and political work irreducible to scholarship or advocacy. It can bear witness, cultivate attention, and create solidarity in ways that argument alone cannot.

Creative submissions are reviewed by the editorial collective in consultation with guest readers with relevant expertise. We seek work of genuine artistic merit and welcome both established and emerging voices. There are no strict length limits for written submissions. Visual work should be submitted as high-resolution files; the journal does not charge reproduction fees and will work with artists on presentation quality.

Open Access and Author Rights

Care in Common is fully open access. There are no subscription fees, paywalls, or article-processing charges of any kind. Every piece published in the journal is freely available to anyone, immediately upon publication and in perpetuity. This is not merely a policy position: the questions this journal addresses — about who does care work, who pays for it, who benefits, and who decides — are questions that belong to everyone. Knowledge about them should not be locked behind commercial barriers.

All published material receives a DOI, is indexed through CrossRef, and appears under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. Authors retain full copyright in their work. They are explicitly free to republish their contributions — in collections, books, other journals, institutional repositories, organizational publications, or any other venue — without seeking permission from the journal. We ask only that original publication in Care in Common be acknowledged.

Publication Schedule and Submissions

Care in Common will publish as an expandable volume over the course of each year so that articles can appear in print as soon as they are completed rather than waiting for a production schedule. Manuscripts are accepted on a rolling basis throughout the year. Authors of refereed submissions will ordinarily receive a first decision within twelve weeks of receipt. Special issues on focused themes will be considered from the editorial collective or from guest editors; proposals are welcome.

The journal welcomes submissions from scholars, practitioners, activists, and artists anywhere in the world. Articles will appear simultaneously in English and the manuscript’s original language. Authors may request that an article also appear in a third language, e.g., if the subject matter pertains to a region where a third language is dominant.  To make this translation policy feasible, we will start with AI-generated translations and work with authors to proofread for quality.

All submissions must be original work not previously published and not under simultaneous consideration elsewhere. Refereed articles should be prepared for anonymous review. Detailed submission guidelines, including formatting requirements and instructions for visual submissions, are available on the Revaluing Care website. Prospective contributors with questions about scope or fit are encouraged to write to the editors before submitting.

Editorial Governance

Care in Common is governed by an editorial collective that draws on the international network of scholars, practitioners, and artists assembled through the Revaluing Care in the Global Economy project. The collective’s composition reflects the network's founding commitment to working across disciplines, geographies, and generations, and to sustaining genuine dialogue among academic researchers, care workers and organizers, and artists.

The journal is committed to equity and representation in its governance, review processes, and published content. We actively seek editorial collective members, reviewers, and contributors whose perspectives, locations, and forms of expertise are underrepresented in mainstream academic publishing — including scholars in the Global South, care workers and organizers, and artists working in non-Western traditions.

Current editorial collective:

Senior editors: Jocelyn Olcott & Tania Rispoli (Duke University)

Collective members:

Eileen Boris (UC Santa Barbara)

Kelly Dombroski (Massey University, Aotearoa New Zealand & Community Economies Institute)

Richard Itaman (University of Leeds, UK)  

Katharine McKinnon (Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand & Community Economies Institute)

Jennifer Nedelsky (University of Toronto)

Shelley Park (University of Central Florida)

Supriya Routh (University of British Columbia)

Sarah Small (University of New England)

Joan Tronto (University of Minnesota)

Mauro Turrini (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid)

Holly Worthen (Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez, Oaxaca)

Relationship to Revaluing Care in the Global Economy

Care in Common is conceived as a complement to the existing public-facing work of the Revaluing Care network. The network's Care Talk blog will continue as a space for accessible public commentary. The working-papers seminar will provide a pipeline for new content and continue to serve as space for early-career and underrepresented scholars to receive constructive feedback on works in progress. Regular thematic workshops will offer a venue to think collectively across different perspectives as we develop issues. The journal adds to this ecosystem a venue for work that has undergone peer review and editorial development, and that can serve as a durable scholarly and archival record of the field.

The journal's three-section structure mirrors the network’s own commitments: to rigorous research that crosses disciplinary lines; to knowledge produced in practice and organizing; and to aesthetic forms that can register the texture of care in ways that argument alone cannot. In this sense, Care in Common is not only a journal about care — it is itself a practice of care: careful, plural, and committed to the common.

Founding Issues: Learning from Latin America

The first four issues of Care in Common take their orientation from a decade of transformative activism, policymaking, and juridical reform in Latin America — a region that has, over this period, produced some of the most consequential thinking and practice around care anywhere in the world. From the streets of Buenos Aires to the constitutional assemblies of Bogotá and Santiago, from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to municipal governments experimenting with new infrastructures of daily life, Latin America has been a laboratory for reimagining what care means, what it demands, and what it can make possible. These founding issues are not exclusively about Latin America — each is a question of global relevance — but they take their energy and much of their evidence from that context and allow us to think together about how concepts and expectations of care travel.

Workshop 1:  Care Against Violence: Gender Violence, Reproductive Justice, and Social Reproduction

The past decade in Latin America has witnessed an extraordinary conjuncture: the massive mobilizations of the Ni Una Menos movement against gender violence alongside deepening crises of femicide, domestic violence, and obstetric violence; hard-won expansions — albeit always in jeopardy — of reproductive rights in some countries alongside sustained assaults on those rights in others; and a growing theoretical and political insistence on understanding gender violence not as an aberration but as structurally produced by the same forces that organize — and devalue — care and social reproduction.

This issue asks how gender violence, reproductive justice, and social reproduction are imbricated: not simply adjacent concerns but phenomena that are co-produced and must be understood together. It invites scholarship that refuses to treat femicide, forced sterilization, obstetric violence, the criminalization of abortion, and the uncompensated labor of social reproduction as separate issues requiring separate analyses. It welcomes accounts of social movements that have made these connections politically visible — the Argentine feminist general strikes, the marea verde movement for reproductive justice, the transnational networks of domestic and care workers — as well as theoretical work that illuminates the structural connections these movements have named. Creative submissions that bear witness to lives shaped by this intersection are especially welcome.

Workshop 2:  Infrastructures of Care

Care requires infrastructure. It requires space, time, resources, and the social arrangements that make sustained provision possible. This issue takes its central example from Bogotá's manzanas del cuidado — blocks of care — a pioneering experiment in creating integrated, spatially anchored public care infrastructure combining childcare, eldercare, care worker training, and support for family caregivers within walking distance of the communities that need them. The manzanas represent a particular vision of care infrastructure: public, feminist, territorially grounded, and designed to redistribute unpaid care burdens rather than simply commodify them. They respond to and exist within Bogotá as a broader urban space that is already configured in particular ways

But infrastructures of care take many forms, and the issue is especially attentive to the imbrication of social, cultural, and ecological dimensions of care infrastructure. Commoning practices, for example, frequently organize social care — childcare, eldercare, mutual aid — alongside cultural transmission and ecological stewardship; the commons itself is often all three at once. This issue invites work on commoning practices through which communities build shared care resources outside the market and the state; on municipal and regional experiments in care provision from across Latin America and beyond; on the architecture and spatial politics of care; on the relationship between care infrastructure and urban planning; on cooperativist and solidarity-economy approaches to organizing care; on Indigenous and peasant traditions of organizing care that refuse the separation of human and ecological flourishing; and on the conditions and organizing of the care workers whose labor any infrastructure depends upon. The issue asks, across all these registers: what social and material conditions make care genuinely possible and how does structuring care transform the systems within which care already exists — and how might it transform care itself

Workshop 3:  Norm Diffusion: Care as Right, Ecology, and Law

Over the past decade, a remarkable set of juridical and normative shifts has unfolded across the Americas. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights' advisory opinion establishing care as a human right, the Inter-American Commission of Women's (CIM) model legislation for creating national care systems (sistemas nacionales de cuidado), Uruguay's pioneering Sistema Nacional Integrado de Cuidados, and analogous legislative efforts in Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, and Mexico have together created a body of emergent law and policy that treats care as a domain of rights and public responsibility rather than private obligation. At the same time, constitutional innovations recognizing the rights of nature — in Ecuador's Pachamama provisions, in river and forest rights decisions across the region — have opened questions about whether and how ecological care can be incorporated into legal and political frameworks.

This issue examines how norms travel, transform, and take root. It invites work on the political and juridical processes through which care has been constituted as a human right and a policy domain; on the gaps between formal recognition and material provision; on how model legislation gets adapted, diluted, or radicalized as it moves between international bodies, national legislatures, and local governments; and on feminist legal theory and its engagement with care. Of particular interest is work that asks how social, cultural, and ecological care are — or might be — held together within legal and normative frameworks. The rights-of-nature provisions emerging across the region represent one attempt to extend a care logic toward the ecological; Indigenous legal traditions offer another, often older, set of understandings for refusing the separation of human and more-than-human care obligations. What does it mean to have a right to care — and what does it mean for law to recognize an obligation to care for the earth, for cultural heritage, and for the conditions that make collective life possible at all?

Workshop 4:  Critical Perspectives on Care

The care framing is not without its critics — and the journal’s commitment to intellectual rigor demands that those critiques be heard, engaged, and taken seriously. This issue is devoted to the critical perspectives that complicate, contest, or refuse the care framework: the suspicion, coming from Black feminist theory, that care discourse has historically been deployed in the service of racial capitalism, white feminism, and the surveillance and control of Black and Indigenous families; the Social Reproduction Theory argument that centering care risks obscuring the structural conditions — exploitation, dispossession, imperialism — that make care both necessary and impossible for so many; and the critiques that have emerged from decolonial and postdevelopment thought about the universalizing assumptions embedded in much care ethics.

These objections have critical political and theoretical stakes. Black feminist scholars have documented how care — the forced care of enslaved women, the underpaid care of domestic workers, the coerced care of mothers under surveillance by child-protective systems — has been as much a site of racial domination as of nurturance. Social Reproduction theorists have argued that the valorization of care can serve to naturalize gender roles and deflect attention from the wage relation and the broader organization of capitalist production. Decolonial thinkers have questioned whether care, as it circulates in international policy discourse, carries with it a particular vision of the family, the state, and the social that forecloses other ways of organizing collective life.

This issue seeks to make these tensions productive. It invites scholarship, practitioner writing, and creative work that refuses easy consolations — that asks hard questions about who is protected and who is exposed by care frameworks, about the difference between care as a demand and care as a discipline, and about the conditions under which care might become a site of liberation rather than control. Critical perspectives are also brought to bear on the journal's own emphasis on the imbrication of social, cultural, and ecological care: Does the turn toward ecological care risk aestheticizing relations of extraction and dispossession? Does the expansion of care’s scope dilute its political edge? Whose knowledge of ecological and cultural care gets recognized — and whose gets absorbed into frameworks that do not belong to them?

Care is undervalued all over the world.

We are exploring why — and how to change that.

For further information or to submit work, contact the editors at revaluingcarelab[at]duke.edu

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