A Reconsideration of Care: Pursuing Gender-Equal Care for Global Health and Wellbeing

We will examine how gendered inequalities affect human health and wellbeing during care crises and explore ways to reconfigure care through greater equality. Care refers to activities to meet needs for food, shelter, and nurturing, which are often embedded in routines of family life, while ‘bound up with inequitable social relations, power and global capitalism’ and located within a moral framework (Rosen, 2019). We hold that responses to care crises caused by middle-generation labour migration, conflicts, and population ageing are mediated by gendered inequalities in resources and power, and by gender norms shaping the moralities of who is entitled to be cared for and who will provide care. This in turn affects the mental and physical health of caregivers and the wellbeing of those for whom they care. Interdisciplinary scholars specializing in different world regions will work with stakeholders in exploring individuals’ diverse care experiences while facing these inequalities. We adopt an intersectional ‘ethics of care’ approach to care and its effects on health and wellbeing. This approach is promising for catalysing new thinking on care among academics, policymakers and beyond because it recognizes mutual human interdependence and vulnerabilities and inequalities in the distribution of these vulnerabilities by gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, dis/ability and generation. The project's evidence-based analysis will be disseminated in an online video, a hybrid workshop, a report, non-academic publications and a special journal issue. The dissemination strategy will open innovative discussion on possibilities for reconfiguring care structures to promote human wellbeing and will stimulate future projects.