Introduction

Care, broadly defined, encompasses all the activities and relations needed for the existence and the well-being of societies. It includes all paid and unpaid activities to meet people's needs and to reproduce the workforce for the labour market. Care systems include healthcare, education, domestic work and social care. In shifting from the current narrow economic model, care should also entail environmental and climate concerns and engaging in social relations based on reciprocity, cooperation and mutuality (ActionAid International 2022a). Care is thus crucial to the functioning of economic and social life. Despite this, care work has long been undervalued and underpaid and often made invisible.

Before moving forward, a note on the relation between “care” and “social reproduction” is warranted. The broad definition of care provided above presents striking similarities with many conceptualizations of social reproduction. Indeed, the similarities reflect overlapping concerns, in the literatures on care and social reproduction, with forms of work and practices that are foundational to the functioning of the economy but that are most often neglected in mainstream political economy (or economics, more generally). However, there are also important differences, and care might be seen as a subset of social reproduction, in that it is mostly concerned with activities that are relational in nature, with carer and cared for fairly easy to recognize. However, in narrowing down the attention to relational activities, the care literature also broadens the scope of analysis of care work by highlighting its emotional and ethical dimensions, in ways that remain more marginal in the social reproduction literature. Importantly, care and social reproduction speak to different debates; most notably, the care literature is primarily focused on gender equality and has a strong policy concern, while social reproduction is also concerned with gender equality but has a broader structural agenda.

The Covid-19 pandemic dramatically exposed and underlined the centrality of care, not only in terms of increased caring for those who had the virus within the domestic household but also for those in hospitals and nursing homes, as a result of government lockdown measures that required people to stay at home, following the mass closure of non-essential workplaces, schools and childcare settings. Families are the main site of care: familial relations comprise the place where most people are nurtured and cared for.