Reconfiguring the Global Politics of Care: Actors, Transformations and Policy Alternatives

Éditeurs invités

• Elifcan Celebi, University of Oxford
• Rossella Ciccia,
• Ayşe Dursun, University of Vienna
• David Palomera, University of Southern Denmark

Synthèse

The global care sector faces intensifying challenges from demographic changes, the pandemic, and fiscal constraints, resulting in overburdened systems and widening inequalities. Market-based and government responses have increasingly transformed care through commodification, financialisation, digitalization, and platformisation, with varied consequences across different regions and economies.

This special issue seeks empirical research exploring how care governance is being reshaped by economic, social, and technological changes, and how new political movements are mobilizing around care issues. The editors welcome studies using diverse methodologies and approaches—including feminist, intersectional, and postcolonial perspectives—that examine actors driving these transformations, institutional alternatives emerging across geographies, and policy innovations that might address the care crisis.

Thèmes proposés

• How do ongoing processes of commodification, financialisation, digitalization and (in)formalisation transform care? What roles do markets and financial actors, as well as international organizations, governments, feminist movements, labour organisations, play?
• How are new and old actors (such as care workers, social movements, care platforms, cooperatives, financial organisations, or public–private and public-communitarian partnerships) reshaping care infrastructures, practices, and labour across the Global North and Global South?
• How are emerging social, economic and technological processes reconfiguring the relationship between states, markets, families, and communities in different contexts? How do gender, race, care, labour, and migration regimes become entangled in new or altered ways at global, national and local scales? And how do these processes affect gender, class, race, nation hierarchies and intersecting inequalities across caregivers and care receivers?
• What kind of policy innovations offer promising alternatives to the structural crisis of care? Which proposals in diverse geographies (e.g., communitarian services, caring cities or care commons) from social movements, international organizations, experts, or local initiatives show promise to offer a pathway to a more caring society?