Speaker:

Eileen Boris, Hull Chair, Department of Feminist Studies, UCSB

Eileen Boris asks us to listen to the demands of those who do the work of care. We all have a stake in their struggle for dignity, respect, recognition, living wages and decent working conditions. We should join in coalition with home health, elder, and childcare workers, with domestic workers of all sorts—if not out of a sense of fairness and social justice than out of self-interest. Better work leads to better care. In the spirit of “Caring Across the Generations,” the initiative launched by the National Domestic Worker Alliance that brings together care providers with care receivers, she invites us to develop a care manifesto. Please bring your experiences as a caregiver or receiver, your visions of a more caring society and what we need to get there and what we in our own communities can do. This journey is not easy, given obstacles built from histories of race, gender, and class inequalities, violence and exploitation. But if the human condition is one of interdependence, it is a trip worth taking—together. Co-sponsored with the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center Value of Care Series.