Call for Papers & Posters

Gender in an Age of Global Care Crises Two-day, Hybrid Conference, 21-22 March 2024

In 2018 UN News warned of a global care crisis set to affect 2.3 billion people. Care refers to activities to meet human needs for food, shelter, and nurturing, often embedded in routines of family life, while ‘bound up with inequitable social relations, power and global capitalism’ (Rosen, 1990). Care crises, difficulties in meeting care needs, arise from a convergence of factors that deprive people of the resources and time and sometimes also even the inclination to care for the elderly, children or vulnerable. Such factors include the demands on individuals to work long and family unfriendly hours, population aging and other demographic changes, insecurities in livelihoods and housing, labour migration, climate change, pandemics, and war.  A global care crisis is also sustained by states’ underinvestment in education, health, social welfare, and social work.

In this conference we seek to explore commonalities and differences in how women and men understand and experience the global care crisis within and across countries. We welcome papers of both qualitative and quantitative methods – discourse and document analysis, interviews, life stories, ethnography, statistical analysis, and mixed methods - that cast light on how care policies and practices are gendered, on how women and men understand and negotiate care crises in different global contexts, and on changes in care provision over time. We especially welcome papers that explore diverse historical and cultural contexts (Boulton and Brannelly, 2015) and critically examine how gendered social norms of care are formed and reinforced under capitalist and racial dynamics. We further welcome papers that interrogate how innovative ways of understandings of care, including an ‘ethics of care’ that emphasizes mutual interdependence, may mitigate sources of crisis in people’s possibilities to give and receive care.

We call for papers that address questions such as:

How do gendered norms and expectations imperceptibly permeate different national care policies and daily care arrangements in different world regions over time?

Why do gendered assumptions and expectations in national policies, workplaces and family practices exacerbate crises in care?

In what ways do men’s and women’s understandings and undertaking of care differ in different global contexts?

How do individuals’ intersectional (class, age, dis/ability, ethnicity, residency) and gendered positioning (including sexual orientation) impact on their negotiations of care crises?

How and why do reconfigurations of care through migration, marketization, or technology in response to care crises rely on and reinforce gendered, racialized and classed inequalities?

How are care crises associated with gender norms and gendered expectations in and across different local contexts?

What are some significant past efforts to address care crises in different world regions, and what lessons can be drawn?

What are future visions about how state policies, market and familial arrangements could be reoriented to remedy the care crisis, for instance, how technology has been and could be mobilized to help solve the problem in different local contexts?

How can research that engages with different world regions help to inform the global coordination needed to address care crises engendered by climate change and other transnational factors, e.g. refugees, human trafficking, norms underpinning gender-based violence?

We also welcome submissions that address other questions in the broad field of intersectional gendered influences on how individuals understand and negotiate care crises in different global and historical contexts.
 

Keynote Speakers

Professor Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Sociology and Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of Southern California

Professor Sharmila Rudrappa, Sociology and South Asia Institute (Director), University of Texas at Austin
 

The conference registration fee will be waived for paper presenters and hub members. Owing to budget constraints, paper presenters will need to cover their travel and accommodation costs. We will provide a list of budget accommodation options in Oxford. 

Please email your abstract and institutional affiliation to gendercarehub@area.ox.ac.uk with ‘abstract’ in the subject line by 15 December 2023

Please email your paper draft and institutional affiliation to gendercarehub@area.ox.ac.uk with ‘paper’ in the subject line by 20th February 2024

 

Call for Posters: Conference Gender in an Age of Global Care Crisis
 

Have you completed an academic research project or a professional case study that you’d like to present in a poster, receive feedback on and inspire other colleagues with? The Conference Gender in an Age of Global Care Crisis aims to maximize the knowledge takeaways for all attendees by accepting posters that address the broad field of intersectional gendered influences on how individuals understand and negotiate care crises in different global and historical contexts.

The Posters session will be an integral part of conference as it will facilitate networking opportunities and offer researchers and other professionals at every career stage an opportunity to publicise their work to a wider international audience and get feedback on their work.

To accommodate participants in different time zones, the poster sessions will be in asynchronous format. The posters will be displayed online on the Conference website, including with a link to a pre-recorded presentation for those who wish to prepare such a presentation. We will incorporate an asynchronous virtual component to improve accessibility, increase engagement, and allow presenters to receive feedback on their work. Organizers will share the live Padlet https://padlet.com/ poster session page with conference attendees, so that they can leave comments and feedback.

If you are interested in virtually displaying your poster via the Conference Gender in an Age of Global Care Crisis please send us an abstract of your proposed poster by 10th November 2023 to gendercarehub@area.ox.ac.uk with ‘poster abstract’ in the subject line. The poster should communicate the essence of your project and the key highlights from your research (up 300 words).  Each poster proposal submission will be evaluated by the conference scientific committee. The Selected poster presenters will receive feedback from the committee reviewers.

Poster presenters will need to register for the virtual version of the Conference by 1st February 2024. The conference registration fee for virtual poster presenters (not attending in person) will be discounted by 70%.

Selected Poster presenters will be invited by 30th November 2023 to send by 22nd January 2024

  • The poster in PDF or JPG format. The minimum size can be 500(W)x250(H) pixels and anything above that with the ratio 2:1. The poster will combine a visual summary of the findings of a paper/study with the opportunity discussion of the presenter’s work.  The poster will need to meet the criteria of clarity of the contents, high impact balancing the text with images, and layout that allows a clear navigation of the flow of the poster.  The poster will have the potential to attract and engage wide and diverse audiences. The poster will need to include your name and institution.
  • An Abstract of the poster (up to 300 words) that will convey the essence of your poster and highlights key points from your research.  Please use Ariel font/size 12.
  • The YouTube link to a 10-minutes presentation aiming at present the poster.
3 August 2023