Care work occupies a structurally distinct position in the landscape of labour. It is simultaneously indispensable and devalued, intimate and politically charged. While issues such as the “care crisis” are increasingly hypervisible in social discourse, care workers themselves remain systematically invisibilised both in these discourses as well as in analyses of labor organizing and resistance. Despite this, organising and resistance in care work is on the rise. Care workers are forming their own associations, community initiatives and unions, as well as organising through established unions. This stream invites contributions that take care work seriously as a sector through which to rethink foundational concepts of agency, resistance, control, and space.
Care work occurs across diverse and often liminal spaces: behind the closed doors of a private house, within institutional care homes, along transnational care chains, and digitally mediated. These spaces do not merely host the labour process, but they also shape how care is performed, how control is enacted, and what forms of worker’s agency or resistance become possible. Boundary struggles between public and private, paid and unpaid, further condition the emergence or suppression of worker voice. From a perspective of social reproduction it also raises questions of how care work is rendered and valued as ‘real work’ instead of as a ‘labour-of-love’. We welcome contributions that analyse the labour process of care work, in all its forms. In line with the overall theme of ILPC 2027, we also emphasise the spaces of care and how spatial organisation structures mechanisms of control and shapes differentiated possibilities of agency and resistance. While institutional care home settings may enable more classical forms of worker organising, highly individualized and often migrant live-in care workers must rely on alternative strategies. These spatial and organisational configurations also shape how digitalization transforms control and surveillance, both empirically and conceptually.
Feminisation and racialisation are not incidental features of care work but structural conditions that shape how caring labour is recognized or rendered invisible. This stream invites contributions that examine how these (and additional) intersecting hierarchies condition the legitimacy accorded to care workers' grievances, their access to collective voice, and the forms of control they face. We are also interested in interrogating how the ‘fetish of care’ constrains what is hinkable as agency or resistance, and how normative expectations of care work can obscure or delegitimize workers’ political actions. Finally, we are interested in how micro-level everyday, often informal or subtle forms of resistance - such as coping, strategic compliance, refusal or negotiation - can accumulate, shift or transform into more formalised repertoires of resistance. At the same time, we are attentive to the macro level: how care workers (dis)engage with, withdraw from, or reshape welfare states, care regimes, labour markets, and political institutions across different (transnational) geographic and institutional contexts.
We welcome contributions that look at or beyond:
- The labour process of different forms of care work
- Forms of agency, resistance in care work, participation, voice and mobilization, with respect to the different spaces of care
- Management and control in care work
- The experience of migrant workers in care
- Urban and rural divides in care work
- Care work, digitalisation and AI
- Care work in relation to the (welfare) state and care regimes
- (Gender-based) violence and care work and its relation to control or space
- Care ethics, social reproduction feminism and the labour process
- Paid and unpaid care work with an emphasis on work
- Repression and obstacles to agency and resistance in care work
- Comparative and cross-national perspectives
- Agency within social reproduction mechanisms
- Intersecting identities and how they condition agency and resistance
This special stream also explicitly invites activists in the field of care work, co-research inside and outside of academia, PhDs and early career researchers as well as more experienced researchers from around the globe. Our aim is to engage in exchange to contribute to research and practices in the context of spaces for (resistance and agency in) care work.