The Revaluing Care in the Global Economy (RCGE) project emerged out of both frustration and inspiration.  It’s a new academic year in the United States, and we’re opening a new chapter for RCGE — it feels like the right moment to take stock of what we’ve accomplished and of what it would take to move forward.

Let’s get the frustration out of the way first.  To start with, despite decades’ worth of rigorous, wide-ranging scholarship — produced by an impressive lineup of researchers, including many readers of and writers for Care Talk — the problem has remained seemingly intractable.  Policymakers turn to a familiar repertoire of magical thinking about policy tweaks, technological innovations, and market solutions that consistently gives way to handwringing about the recognition that, around the world, care labor in all its forms remains badly undervalued and overwhelmingly performed by racially and ethnically marginalized women.

The other frustration stems from the fact that research on care has remained siloed by topic, discipline, and geographic area.  Although there is growing recognition that social, cultural, and ecological care all have implications for one another, they are generally studied in isolation. Although the challenges related to these forms of care demand multiple perspectives, they generally remain segregated within disciplinary frameworks. And although these three areas all cross political borders, research typically focuses on national and local contexts.

Now for the inspiration.  I had been thinking and writing about these questions for a couple of decades when I had the opportunity to spend an academic year at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Nantes, a research center founded by a scholar of labor law with a particular interest in the ways that metrics have shaped public policy.  Although situated in northwest France, the Institute focuses on knowledge production from and about the Global South.  The exchanges with scholars there inspired the idea of approaching this problem from a transnational, interdisciplinary perspective — an approach that demands collaboration across intellectual formations, geographic locations, and generational orientations.

In April 2019, several offices at Duke University funded a brainstorming session about the value of care that brought together 22 researchers from various disciplines and from every continent. This session generated a focus on the interconnections of social, cultural, and ecological care and three research areas: metrics (how to measure care and the ways that measurement changes its nature), governance (how laws and policies create and reflect normative values around care), and social practices (e.g., how household and community formations promote or diminish various forms of care.)

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, of course, it shone a black light on the cracks within our care systems.  The triple crisis of the pandemic, climate change, and a long-overdue racial reckoning also highlighted the interconnectedness of social, cultural, and ecological care.  The imperative that we move our activities online offered an unanticipated opportunity to continue with a broadly collaborative project while avoiding the environmental and financial costs of air travel.

In the years since, with ongoing support from Duke and a recent National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Collaborative Research grant, we have built a successful working-papers seminar showcasing the work of underrepresented and early-career scholars from around the world.  We have benefited from collaborations with other networks in this field such as the Community Economies Research Network and the Carework Network (whose global summit we will host next June).  We have developed a dynamic website that was particularly strengthened by the addition of Care Talk and continues to offer new resources and research.

The NEH grant has given us a three-year window of opportunity to strengthen this project and create something that might reshape the field in a more durable way.  Most immediately, we are exploring the possibility of launching an online, open-access journal to increase the visibility of care studies and to pursue our objective of bridging across research areas with question- or problem-driven topical issues. The idea has generated considerable enthusiasm among researchers, but such an undertaking will demand considerable financial and labor inputs.  Our first task is to gauge feasibility and sustainability.

We also need to consider the sustainability of RCGE more generally and how to move from year-to-year funding to something that would allow us to plan several years ahead.  When we launched RCGE in the spring of 2019, I had a fantasy object in mind:  the creation of a Center for Care Studies that would serve as a kind of intellectual collision space to foster innovative research in this field.

When I was in graduate school, the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale was a vibrant space for rethinking the relationship between the human and non-human worlds.  Through a long-running seminar that included graduate students, postdocs, and visiting researchers from all over the world, the program incubated the type of boundary-crossing discussions that reshaped both the academic and public debate in this area.  It certainly helped that its director, the late Jim Scott, had a gift for synthesizing the wide-ranging scholarship that passed through there into sharply analytical and lucidly accessible books that influenced discussions well outside of agrarian studies. 

A Center for Care Studies may be a tall order, but it would address a constellation of long-standing and urgent issues.  One way or another, such an endeavor would require institutional substantial support.  (If you have any connections, let me know — we would happily call it the [Your Name Here] Center for Care Studies!)  But this center would allow us to think beyond the standard repertoire of solutions by bridging across divides and learning from communities and cultures that have approach care provision in different ways.

The cover picture is designed by Nancy Folbre
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