Revaluing Care Lab

Continuing the work of the Revaluing Care in the Global Economy project, launched in 2019, the Revaluing Care Lab explores both how to center care as an ethical value and how to value care as a practice. Although scholars debate the meanings of care, a consensus exists that it involves relational, context-specific, labor-intensive processes; a commonly cited explanation defines it as “a species activity that includes everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world so that we may live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web” (Fisher and Tronto 1990: 40). This project considers how to value the vast amounts of time; expertise; and physical, intellectual, and emotional labor required for the provision of care — not only of households and dependents but also of the non-human environment, of cultural traditions, and of social structures and networks. Lab projects will include a working-papers seminar, a for-credit Duke seminar, mini-conferences, study groups, weeklong residencies, and a multimedia history project on the Carework Network.

The Revaluing Care Lab is co-directed by Saskia Cornes, Assistant Professor of the Practice at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute and Program Director of the Duke Campus Farm; Jennifer Nash, Jean Fox O'Barr Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies; and Jocelyn Olcott, Professor of History.