Revaluing Care in the Global Economy
Global Perspectives on Metrics, Governance, and Social Practices
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Working Papers Seminar Series
Healing Care
Join us to learn about the politics, ethics, and aesthetics of touch in Gandhi’s care for the leprous body — and what this reveals about untouchability, stigma, and caregiving — through research by Sumathi Ramaswamy (Duke University), with a response from Harris Solomon (Duke University).
🗓️ Friday, April 3, 2026
⏰12:00-1:30PM (EDT)
📍Hybrid (Smith Warehouse, Bay 4, C106 / Zoom)
🍽️ Light lunch offered
🎫Registration free but required
Cuidado Comunitario
(Bilingual session / Sesión bilingue)
Join us to learn about community care practices as situated responses to gender-based violence and urban precarity in León, Guanajuato, Mexico through research by Marcia Moreno Benítez (independent researcher), with a response from Verónica Gago (UBA, UNSAM, CONICET)
🗓️ Wednesday, April 8, 2026
⏰1:25-2:40 PM (EDT)
📍Online (Zoom – Translated captioning available)
🎫Registration free but required
Working Papers Seminar Series 2025-2026
This is the fourth edition of the Working Papers Seminar Series, an online forum where early- and mid-career scholars share work in progress with experts from the interdisciplinary field of care studies. The Fall 2025 cycle is fully supported by the Revaluing Care Lab at the Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University.
Other Upcoming Events
Breakdown: Thinking and Making Compost Together
This session centers compost as both material process and theoretical problem, exploring decay, waste, labor, and transformation through collective compost-making and discussion.
🗓️ Saturday, March 28, 2026
🕙10:00AM-12:00PM
📍 Duke Campus Farm
🥞 Light breakfast included
🎫 Registration is free but required
Book Conversation with Wendy Harcourt
Join us for a conversation with scholar and RCGE Board Member Wendy Harcourt about her new open-access book Conundrums of Care: Feminist Entanglements in Critical Development Studies. Drawing on stories from different places, peoples, and histories, the book illuminates how care is understood across key feminist debates — from social reproduction and interspecies relations in posthumanism, to environmental justice in feminist political ecology, to reciprocity and accountability in postdevelopment and decolonialism. Responses from fellow Board Members Arturo Escobar (UNC), Felwine Sarr (Duke University), and Suzanne Bergeron (University of Michigan).
🗓️ Wednesday, April 29
⏰10:00-11:00AM (EDT)
📍Online (Zoom – Translated captioning available)
🎫Registration free but required
Working Papers Blog
Debilitating Care
Brazil’s Zika epidemic left thousands of children with congenital Zika syndrome (CZS), most born to structurally vulnerable Black and mixed-race mothers who now carry the burden of lifelong care. The relentless demands of caregiving—shaped by poverty, fragmented services, and bureaucratic barriers—gradually wear mothers down physically and mentally. Their stories show how epidemics produce wider, unevenly distributed forms of embodied harm beyond those directly diagnosed with disease.
Care Norms and Carebots
Can robots care well? In thinking about our budding relationships with embodied AI, it is essential to reflect on the emergent norms that makes care possible for machines and humans alike.
The Social and Cultural Role of Cooperation
In the face of growing social fragmentation and a crisis of care, cooperation offers an alternative way of organizing economic and social life. Drawing on Beatrice Potter Webb and the Italian cooperative tradition, this piece explores how cooperativism can regenerate social bonds beyond competition and extraction.
The Power of Data in Care Work Policy
What can a laundry bucket teach us about how beliefs about the value of quantitative data in policy making shape efforts to address unpaid care work?
Care Talk Visit Care Talk Archive
The Shrinking Cushion of Unpaid Care
What happened to the dream of a dual-earner/dual carer household?
The Activist Intellectual Legacy of Eileen Boris
Eileen Boris’s retirement conference looks toward the future of the history of care work.
The Care Economy Revolution
Two very different projects argue that the care economy could bring about the end of capitalism as we know it.
Care is Climate Infrastructure: Report from COP30
COP30 in Belém showed that there is no possible climate justice without placing care at the center of global solutions and investments.
Taxing the Top
As the distribution of both wealth and income has become unequal, political efforts to tax the top to finance investment in public goods like childcare have gained traction.
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