Lecture “How Capitalism Invented the Care Economy”
Barnard College Professor Premilla Nadasen will explore the contemporary “care economy” and its consequences for both equity and care.
Care work has gained unprecedented attention with the Covid-19 pandemic but its place in the economy is not well understood. Both unpaid and paid care work provides crucial labor for human well-being, and paid care workers to form a substantial part of our economy.
What is the relationship between care for those in need, capital accumulation, and the labor of social reproduction in the context of the neoliberal U.S. economy? Professor Premilla Nadasen will offer a genealogy of care work, and set out its central place in the history of capitalism. Analyzing the politics of care requires distinguishing between the care discourse and the labor of social reproduction; between the care economy and radical care politics. Professor Nadasen dives into neoliberal systems of care to illuminate how the care economy is wedded to capitalist profit, how the contemporary care discourse obscures inequities, and how models of radical care offer alternative ways of imagining and practicing care.
Premilla Nadasen is a Professor of History at Barnard College, Columbia University. She has been involved in social justice organizing for many decades and published extensively on the multiple meanings of feminism, alternative labor movements, and grass-roots community organizing. She has a forthcoming book, Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Haymarket 2023.
The O’Connell Initiative for the Global History of Capitalism is a forum for intellectual exploration. It brings together scholars of every aspect of capitalism, from its earliest medieval manifestations to its twenty-first-century consequences across the globe. It supports groundbreaking research and teaching on global capitalism and engages with the public through lectures, debates, and workshops. The O’Connell Initiative in the Global History of Capitalism is supported by generous gifts from Fordham alumnus Robert J. O’Connell, FCRH ’65.
(Image Credit: Blanka Major, based on “Domestic workers army” by Andreas Siekmann (2011)
Time: 6:00 PM EDT
Free!
