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Global Economies of Care

This programme has now ended, but continues as a network. The III networks are former research programmes that continue to be active in research, collaboration, and impact in their subject area.

This network highlights the role of care as an economic driver of value by centring the significance of feminist debates and social reproduction analysis to inequalities research. It unveils the hidden value of care right from within the household to across the global economy, from domestic and care labour to planetary care.

This research network is led by Professor Alpa Shah. The Assistant Professorial Research Fellow for this network is Dr Shalini Grover.

If there is anything revealed by the global crisis created by the COVID-19 pandemic, it is how central a role care plays in global inequalities. This is not only a question of the decades of undervaluing our care workers (our health workers, our carers, our cleaners) or the stark ‘care inequalities’ faced by different communities across the world in access to care, but also how central care is for life itself. It is the question of the centrality of social reproduction – giving birth, bringing up children, running households, educating, looking after the elderly – for the global economy and how under capitalism this care is so easily hidden and devalued.

Without care the global economy could not function, yet care is rarely recognised as a key economic driver of value. Without care, workers would not be born, fed, educated and replenished. Social reproduction would halt. But care is not just a labour issue, not just caring for but also caring about. Care is about how we relate to others, the fundamental social relations that underpin our lives and survival. How we conceive of caring is also intimately connected to the politics we get. The care network is a space to examine the different scales, spaces and experiences of care. It is also an arena to highlight and examine the conditions of all the multiple informal hidden economies of care, moving from global patterns of migration regimes to the intimate realm of household structures and moral duties. Crucial to this agenda is to explore the gendered and racialized inequalities and politics of care.