CARE is an interdisciplinary research group that is conducting research on social reproduction and care (its embodied, cognitive and emotional elements) empirically and theoretically. The group seeks to offer an interdisciplinary platform for discussing ongoing and new research on the themes below, and related issues.

We are pursuing research in the following five key dimensions of care and social reproduction:

• Institutions of care - How are institutions, at various levels, providing, framing and conditioning care, and to what extent are they changing?
• Regulation of care – In which sense do formal norms (e.g. laws, conventions and collective agreements) regulate care? To what extent are there co-existing regulations and what are their implications for the way care is provided? How have political and social struggles focused on care and social reproduction, at various political levels?
• Identities of care - To what extent are various identities of care changing e.g. professional identities; gendered identities and self-responsibilizing features of neo-liberalism?
• Care as work - What kind of changes can we identify and to what extent are technologies (in its wider sense) shaping care assemblages and vice versa?
• Welfare, work and societal transformation - How do welfare states, labour markets, families and other welfare actors respond to challenges from demography, technology and globalisation?’

Beyond the four key dimensions, there are also cross-cutting dimensions such as issues of democracy, justice and sustainability (socially and ecologically). Care can also function as an alternative to a neo-liberalised order and as an ideal for democracy and from such a perspective, we are interested in exploring how these discussions about care contribute to democratic imaginaries, different kinds of solidarities and alternative political concepts of democracy. But care is also about justice as there are intensified political struggles about care: its recognition, valorisation and distribution. Here we explore different ways of theorizing justice in relation to care and aim to contribute to general discussions of what a just society is. A third cross-cutting theme is care and welfare state sustainability. Here we are interested in how care and social reproduction, and respective social struggles, are related to broader discussions about the future of the welfare state.

Contact person: Hanne Marlene Dahl, [email protected]