Care Work: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

“Care” is often affirmed as an ultimate good. Yet, as a labor matter, it’s valued as if it were something very bad: according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median care worker wage is $17.21 per hour, or $35,800 per year. How can a socially valuable form of work be also, as one scholar puts it, “devalued dirty work”?

In this course, we will explore the good, bad, and ugly sides of “care,” attending to its social, political, and philosophical dimensions. We’ll consider the simultaneous affirmation of care work as intimate and necessary alongside its stigmatization as menial and degrading, connecting these phenomena to issues of race, gender, citizenship, and class. We’ll ask: What constitutes care? How do we care for the self and others? When does care hurt or injure? And how do we compare different registers of care such as emotional, physical, and social or institutional? Studying care work, reproductive labor, and social reproduction as documented lived experience, we’ll confront not just the the interrelationship of care and social difference, but also the global politics of labor migration and the increasingly transnational character of care networks in our communities. We will pay special attention to the idea of radical care, and consider the possibility that even negativity or refusal might act as a form of care. Readings will be drawn from works by Emma Amador, Celeste Curington, Ariel Ducey, Evelyn Glenn, Hi’ilei Hobart, Tamara Kneese, Premilla Nadasen, Ashanté Reese, and the Care Collective, among others.