Care in Crisis

As for many, becoming a parent during the pandemic was quite a challenge for me. In order not to lose my mind while trapped in the house with a newborn, I began to analyse my social position as a parent, which from a materialist feminist perspective is the position of an unpaid care worker. This social theory as self-care resulted, among other things, in the research project Care in Crisis.

Through five case studies that combine archival work, interviews, and auto-theoretical essays, the project examines diagnoses of care crises, their historical antecedents, and the antidotes that (early) feminist history has developed in response to similar experiences. So far, I have identified the following historical strategies for dealing with them: Refusing to do care work, fighting for wages for domestic work, rationalising domestic work, organising domestic work cooperatively, moving to utopian communities.

What have these strategies for reducing care work achieved? How have they been co-opted by new regimes of accumulation? How have these historical experiments and initiatives affected the present? What impulses do they have for us today?