Care Economies

Faslane Peace Camp and the Political Economy of the Everyday

Citation:

Eschle, Catherine. 2016. “Faslane Peace Camp and the Political Economy of the Everyday.” Globalizations 13 (6): 912–14.

Author: Catherine Eschle

Annotation:

Excerpt:

"In what ways is ‘the everyday’ reproduced and reconfigured at protest camps? I pursue this question in my current research project, in which protest camps are defined as a ‘place-based social movement strategy that involves both acts of ongoing protest and acts of social reproduction needed to sustain everyday life’ (Feigenbaum, Frenzel, & McCurdy, 2013, p. 12). . . . buttressed by a feminist curiosity about the interconnections between the personal and political, I cling to the view that the reconfiguration of the everyday in protest camps is intrinsic rather than irrelevant to their political effect. In this short piece, I examine how daily life at Faslane Peace Camp, in Scotland, depends upon and fosters the critical interrogation of economic norms" (Eschle 2016, 912).

Topics: Economies, Care Economies, Feminist Economics, Feminisms, Feminist Political Economy, Gender, Gender Roles, Women, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Equality/Inequality, Peace and Security, Peacebuilding, Rights, Women's Rights, Weapons /Arms, Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)

Year: 2016

"Para el Bien Común" Indigenous Women's Environmental Activism and Community Care Work in Guatemala

Citation:

Hallum-Montes, Rachel. 2012. “‘Para El Bien Común’ Indigenous Women’s Environmental Activism and Community Care Work in Guatemala.” Race, Gender & Class 19 (1/2): 104–30.

Author: Rachel Hallum-Montes

Abstract:

This article adopts an "eco-intersectional" perspective to examine the motivations and strategies that guide indigenous women's environmental activism in Guatemala. A total of 33 indigenous Kaqchikel women who work with a transnational environmental organization were interviewed in 2006 and 2009. The interviews reveal that gender, race, and class figured prominently in women's decisions to become environmental activists. Women mobilized around their identities as mothers and caregivers, and viewed their environmental activism as a way of caring for both their families and the indigenous community. Women also linked their local activism to larger social movements—including the indigenous, women's, and environmental movements. The article concludes by discussing recommendations for academic, activist, and policy work.

Keywords: gender, indigenous, environment, Guatemala, ecofeminism

Topics: Economies, Care Economies, Environment, Feminisms, Ecofeminism, Gender, Women, Indigenous, Indigenous Knowledge Systems, Race Regions: Americas, Central America Countries: Guatemala

Year: 2012

Black Women in the United States and Unpaid Collective Work: Theorizing the Community as a Site of Production

Citation:

Banks, Nina. 2020. “Black Women in the United States and Unpaid Collective Work: Theorizing the Community as a Site of Production.” The Review of Black Political Economy 47 (4): 343–62.

Author: Nina Banks

Abstract:

This analysis discusses the lived experiences of Black American women as the basis for a new theoretical framework for understanding women’s unpaid work. Feminist economists have called attention to the invisibility of women’s unpaid work within the private household but have not adequately considered the unpaid, nonmarket work that women perform collectively to address urgent community needs that arise out of racial and ethnic group disparities. As such, racialized women’s unpaid, nonmarket work continues to be subject to invisibility. This analysis reconceptualizes Black women’s community activism as unpaid, nonmarket “work” and illustrates that the community is a primary site of nonmarket production by Black women and other racialized women. The community is an important site where racialized women perform unpaid, nonmarket collective work to improve the welfare of community members and address community needs not met by the public and private sectors. The analysis elevates the community to a site of production on par with the household, thereby calling for a paradigm shift in feminist economic conceptualizations of unpaid work. This new framework enables us to examine intersectional linkages across different sites of production—firms, households, and communities—where multiple forms of oppression operate in structuring peoples’ lives. Compared with additive models of gender and race, this intersectional approach more fully captures the magnitude of racialized women's oppression.

Keywords: African American women, unpaid work, community work

Topics: Economies, Care Economies, Feminist Economics, Gender, Women, Intersectionality, Race Regions: Americas, North America Countries: United States of America

Year: 2020

The Case for Degrowth

Citation:

Kallis, Giorgos, Susan Paulson, Giacomo D’Alisa, and Federico Demaria. 2020. The Case for Degrowth. Wiley. 

Authors: Kallis, Giorgos, Susan Paulson, Giacomo D'Alisa, Federico Demaria

Annotation:

Summary:
The relentless pursuit of economic growth is the defining characteristic of contemporary societies. Yet it benefits few and demands monstrous social and ecological sacrifice. Is there a viable alternative? How can we halt the endless quest to grow global production and consumption and instead secure socio-ecological conditions that support lives worth living for all?

In this compelling book, leading experts Giorgos Kallis, Susan Paulson, Giacomo D’Alisa and Federico Demaria make the case for degrowth - living well with less, by living differently, prioritizing wellbeing, equity and sustainability.  Drawing on emerging initiatives and enduring traditions around the world, they advance a radical degrowth vision and outline policies to shape work and care, income and investment that avoid exploitative and unsustainable practices. Degrowth, they argue, can be achieved through transformative strategies that allow societies to slow down by design, not disaster.

Essential reading for all concerned citizens, policy-makers, and students, this book will be an important contribution to one of the thorniest and most pressing debates of our era. (Summary from Wiley)

Topics: Economies, Care Economies

Year: 2020

Beyond Limits and Scarcity: Feminist and Decolonial Contributions to Degrowth

Citation:

Mehta, Lyla, and Wendy Harcourt. 2021. “Beyond Limits and Scarcity: Feminist and Decolonial Contributions to Degrowth.” Political Geography, May, 102411. doi: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102411.

Authors: Lyla Mehta, Wendy Harcourt

Annotation:

Summary:
"We welcome this opportunity to participate in this important dialogue between political ecology and degrowth. We bring to this debate two issues: (1) perspectives on limits and scarcity, and (2) the histories and knowledges of feminist political ecology and decolonial feminism as a way of enriching degrowth's political grammar and strategies" (Mehta & Harcourt 2021).
 
"We argue that degrowth needs to learn from feminist political ecology in how to imagine possible futures beyond the theories, policies, and practices of capitalist and socialist/state-capitalist growth. Changing our ways of thinking, and our desires, habits and ways of being with others, requires new relations of care. It is our common responsibility to care which is the political and substantive work of creating degrowth futures" (Mehta & Harcourt 2021).

Topics: Economies, Care Economies, Feminisms, Feminist Political Ecology

Year: 2021

Marxist-Feminist Theories and Struggles Today: Essential Writings on Intersectionality, Labour and Ecofeminism

Citation:

Fakier, Khayaat, Diana Mulinari, and Nora Räthzel, eds. 2020. Marxist-Feminist Theories and Struggles Today: Essential Writings on Intersectionality, Labour and Ecofeminism. London: Zed Books.

Authors: Khayaat Fakier , Diana Mulinari, Nora Räthzel

Annotation:

Summary:

This vital new collection presents new Marxist-Feminist analyses of Capitalism as a gendered, racialized social formation that shapes and is shaped by specific nature-labour relationships. Leaving behind former overtly structuralist thinking, Marxist-Feminist Theories and Struggles Today interweaves strands of ecofeminism and intersectional analyses to develop an understanding of the relations of production and the production of nature through the interdependencies of gender, class, race and colonial relations. With contributions and analyses from scholars and theorists in both the global North and South, this volume offers a truly international lens that reveals the the vitality of contemporary global Marxist-Feminist thinking, as well as its continued relevance to feminist struggles across the globe (Summary from Zed Books).

Table of Contents:

Introduction
Khayaat Fakier, Diana Mulinari, Nora Räthzel

Part I – Conceptualising

1. Standpoint Theory
Cynthia Cockburn

2. Outside in the Funding Machine
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

3. Contradictions in Marxist Feminism
Frigga Haug

4. Ecofeminism as (Marxist) Sociology
Ariel Salleh

5. The ‘Flat Ontology’ of Neoliberal Feminism
Jennifer Cotter

6. The Byzantine Eunuch: Pre-capitalist Gender Category, ‘Tributary’ Modal Contradiction, and a Test for Materialist Feminism
Jules Gleeson

7. Reading Marx against the Grain: Rethinking the Exploitation of Care Work Beyond Profit-Seeking
Tine Haubner

Part II – Production

8. Marx and Social Reproduction Theory: Three Different Historical Strands
Ankica Čakardić

9. The Best Thing I Have Done Is to Give Birth; The Second Is to Strike
Paula Mulinari

10. Women in Small Scale Fishing in South Africa: An Ecofeminist Engagement with the ‘Blue Economy’
Natasha Solari and Khayaat Fakier

11. The ‘Crisis of Care’ and the Neoliberal Restructuring of the Public Sector – a Feminist Polanyian Analysis
Rebecca Selberg

12. Gender Regimes and Women’s Labour: Volvo Factories in Sweden, Mexico, and South Africa
Nora Räthzel, Diana Mulinari, Aina Tollefsen

Part III – Religions and Politics

13. Religious Resistance: A Flower on the Chain or a Tunnel towards Liberation?
Gabriele Dietrich

14. A Marxist-Feminist Perspective: From Former Yugoslavia to Turbo Fascism to Neoliberal Postmodern Fascist Europe
Marina Gržinić

15. Feminism, Antisemitism and the Question of Palestine/Israel
Nira Yuval Davis

Part IV – Solidarities

16. Women in Brazilian's Trade Union Movement
Patricia Vieira Trópia

17. Argentinean Feminist Movements: Debates from Praxis
Ana Isabel González Montes

18. Marxist Feminism for a Global Women’s Movement against Capitalism
Ligaya Lindio McGovern

19. Marxist/Socialist Feminist Theory and Practice in the USA Today
Nancy Holmstrom 

20. Solidarity in Troubled Times: Social Movements in the Face of Climate Change
Kathryn Russell

Topics: Class, Coloniality/Post-Coloniality, Economies, Care Economies, Environment, Feminisms, Ecofeminism, Gender, Gendered Power Relations, Intersectionality, Race, Religion Regions: Africa, MENA, Southern Africa, Americas, North America, South America, Europe, Balkans, Nordic states Countries: Argentina, Brazil, Israel, Mexico, Palestine / Occupied Palestinian Territories, South Africa, Sweden, United States of America

Year: 2020

Don’t Let Another Crisis Go to Waste: The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Imperative for a Paradigm Shift

Citation:

Heintz, James, Silke Staab, and Laura Turquet. 2021. “Don’t Let Another Crisis Go to Waste: The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Imperative for a Paradigm Shift.” Feminist Economics. doi: 10.1080/13545701.2020.1867762

Authors: James Heintz, Silke Staab, Laura Turquet

Abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed how globalized, market-based economies critically depend on a foundation of nonmarket goods, services, and productive activities that interact with capitalist institutions and impact market economies. These findings, long argued by feminist economists, have profound implications for how we think about our economic futures. This paper shows how lessons from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic can inform how people think about the future of our economies and, specifically, how to address a trio of interlocking crises: care work, environmental degradation, and macroeconomic consequences. Drawing on these lessons, this paper argues for a necessary paradigm shift and discusses the implications of such a shift for social and economic policies.

Keywords: Crisis, care economy, sustainability, macroeconomics

Topics: Economies, Care Economies, Environment, Feminisms, Feminist Political Economy, Health

Year: 2021

Gender and Mobility: A Critical Introduction

Citation:

Penttinen, Elina, and Anitta Kynsilehto. 2017. Gender and Mobility: A Critical Introduction. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Authors: Elina Penttinen, Anitta Kynsilehto

Annotation:

Summary:
Our world is characterized by mobility. The number of refugees on the global scale has increased considerably. Meanwhile border control measures and legal avenues for mobility have been severely curbed, and the political climate has become all the more violent against racialized and gendered “Others”. Business elites traverse the fast-track lines to financial hubs and tourists discover new destinations. Ageing societies need people from abroad to perform care work. Domestic workers carve out nearer and further paths to reach employment, often leaving their family members behind in need of care. This book examines global mobilities from gendered perspectives, asking how gender together with race/ethnicity, social class, nationality and sexuality shape globally mobile lives. By developing analysis that cuts through economic structures, policies and individuals enacting agency, the book demonstrates how intersectional feminist analysis helps to comprehend uneven mobilities. Through multidisciplinary angle the book draws examples from different parts of the world and refuses to provide easy answers. Calling for students, scholars and general readers alike, the book invites the reader to imagine and relate to the world in manifold ways. (Summary from Google Books)

Topics: Class, Displacement & Migration, Refugees, Economies, Care Economies, Gender, Gender Analysis, Intersectionality, Race, Sexuality

Year: 2017

Of Markets and Martyrs: Is It OK To Pay Well for Care?

Citation:

Nelson, Julie A. 1999. “Of Markets and Martyrs: Is It OK To Pay Well for Care?” Feminist Economics 5 (3): 43–59.

Author: Julie A. Nelson

Abstract:

If caring work were well paid, would it lose some of the special, emotional, interpersonal aspects we want in “real” care relationships? Some fear that the introduction of “market values” would lead to such an outcome. This article seeks to bring to light some logical fallacies and insuficiently expunged gender dualisms that may lie, unexamined, under such concerns. Examining the ways we think and talk about markets, meanings, and motivations, it argues that the foci of feminist concern should instead be the concrete structures of caregiving and the problem of under-demand.

Keywords: caring, labor, wages, dualism, markets, commodification

Topics: Economies, Care Economies, Feminist Economics, Gender, Women

Year: 1999

Husbandry: A (Feminist) Reclamation of Masculine Responsibility for Care

Citation:

Nelson, Julie A. 2016. “Husbandry: A (Feminist) Reclamation of Masculine Responsibility for Care.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 40 (1): 1–15

Author: Julie A. Nelson

Abstract:

While extremely important and revolutionary, much feminist work on the economics of care has risked reinforcing an association of care with only women and with only women’s traditional activities. This article revives the image of ‘husbandry’, understood as careful cultivation, tending and management, as a complement to the image of mothering. A rich masculine prototype of care may be helpful in reawakening male responsibility for care, and revitalising the recognition of the necessity of concern and carefulness in all of economic life. The ‘good husbandman’, in stark contrast to ‘economic man’, lives a fuller life, acting responsively and responsibly. This article lays out the need for such a rich image; suggests applications to the environment, carework and business management; and addresses some possible drawbacks.

Keywords: care, masculinity, gender, husbandry

Topics: Economies, Care Economies, Feminist Economics, Environment, Feminisms, Gender, Masculinity/ies

Year: 2016

Pages

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