Care Economics: Towards new directions of research

In his works Adam Smith, one of the founding fathers of modern economics, theorised the pivotal role of self-interest in the economy. What modern economics did not say (until Marçal’s book “Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?”) is that, for his entire life, Smith’s mother cooked him dinner. Not out of self-interest, but out of love. Social reproduction, domestic and unpaid labour mostly carried out by women, and carework are the centre of our economy. However, the economic theory has been elaborated culpably ignoring these dimensions.

Care Economics: Towards new directions of research is a two-day workshop that will take place on May 29-30 at the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa (Italy). The workshop is jointly organised by the Young Scholars Initiative and the Institute of Economics (Sant’Anna). It aims at bringing together scholars with different theoretical and empirical perspectives on Care Economics, in order to put forward a common framework and forge ahead new lines of research.
As part of the body of analysis referring to Feminist Economics, Care Economics is intended here as the political economy of paid and unpaid care work, stressing care as a new economic dimension shaped by institutional and productive structures, cultural traditions, as well as by individual and collective negotiation.

The workshop is articulated in three sessions, each tackling one of the core domains of care economics. National and international scholars will be invited to present their work.
The first session deals with essential jobs and their relationship with the transformation of productive structures. Sectoral and occupational units of analysis will be considered to assess the importance of care activity both in terms of societal needs and economic relevance on employment and wage dynamics.
The second session aims to reconsider national welfare state systems, according to both their transformative impact on distributive market outcomes and to how they relate to family settings and individual choice between waged and unwaged working time. This session explores the link between income and (elder- and child-) care inequalities, which is gaining momentum due to the interplay of welfare state retrenchment, ageing population, and marketisation of care services.
The third session investigates the role of care in historical perspective. It focuses on the subtle differences between paid and unpaid activities, market and domestic labour, intrahousehold allocation of work and care and its evolution over time. The importance of care and how to measure it in the economic history framework will be at the centre of this session.

The three sessions will be followed by a roundtable where leading scholars and experts will discuss the main questions that arose during the workshop and advance proposals on future streams of research. The roundtable brings together two events taking place at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in the Spring semester, the present workshop and the Gender and Labour studies seminar series, an interdisciplinary project jointly organised by the Institutes of Economics and the Political Science of the Sant’Anna School of Advanced.
The set-up of the final roundtable as a co-organized event confirms the necessity felt by the community of the School to integrate interdisciplinary studies on gender and care in the curricula and in the academic discussion.

Participation in person is strongly encouraged; the entire event will be held in the main building of the Sant’Anna School of Advanced.
Click here to attend online on May 29
Click here to attend online on May 30