About The Conference

Caregiving for family members and other loved ones including children, older, ill and disabled people, overwhelmingly done by women inside and outside the home, keeps economies and society going but impoverishes those who do it.

While caregivers, unwaged and waged, demand that their work be valued and justly rewarded, and those who need their help demand choices about the care they are entitled to, a low-wage, for-profit care industry is booming. This exploitative industry employs mainly women, often of color and/or immigrant, or replaces them with uncaring AI. 

The Our Right to Care conference will bring together academics, researchers, advocates, community organizers, unpaid and paid caregivers and those who depend on care locally, nationally and internationally, to look at how caring relationships based on promoting choice, independent living and mutual respect can be financially supported rather than expanding a care industry based on profits, forced dependence, low standards, low pay and exploitation. The conference will establish the human and social right to care and to access the care we choose when we need it.

Considerations:

• Connection between unwaged family caregiving and low-waged care.
• Impact of caregiving on women, starting with mothers, who are presently institutionalized by poverty in the double or triple day.
• Impact of care industry working conditions on paid caregivers and those who depend on care.
• Disproportionality by gender and race of unpaid and low-paid caregiving.
• Differences in caregiving and resources for caregivers among countries, North and South, urban and rural.
• Essential and fundamental role of caregiving for people and the land in the face of and countering ecological collapse and the unraveling of the web of life.

Outcomes:

• Displays of historical and archival struggles for money for caregivers
• A reading list and compilation of resource material
• A publication of the conference proceedings as well as a video recording.

Planning Committee: 

Hafeeza Anchrum, Rosemary Barbera, Stefania Barca, Diane Cornman-Levy, Eric Gjertsen, Pilar Gonalons-Pons, Selma James, Madelyn Johnson, Phoebe Jones, Nina Lopez, Elisa Minoff, Peggy O’Mara, Margaret Prescod, Dorothy Roberts, Sidney Ross-Risden, Alexa Tetik, Alissa Trotz. 

Sponsored by: 

Penn Program on Race, Science & Society, Center for the Study of Social Policy, Global Women's Strike and Women of Color/GWS, Women’s Way, Women in Dialogue

Co-Sponsors:

University of Pennsylvania Center for Africana Studies, School of Social Policy and Practice, School of Nursing, Department of Sociology, Program in Gender,  Sexuality and Women's Studies, Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies and  Lauder Institute

Funders: Howard Family Giving, University Research Foundation(URF)Grants Program 2024. Special thank you to the Mellon Foundation for its support of the Wages for Housework Community Archives and the archives and historical components of the Our Right to Care conference

Thank you:   Highpoint Cafe, Philly Childcare Collective, Weaver's Way Coop.