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

Project overview

Supported by the Academy of Medical Sciences (AMS) Networking Grant Scheme (Ref: NGR2\1471), and led by PI Ruchira Sen and Co-I Rachel Murphy, an international team of specialists on care and gender has engaged in a year-long project to explore: A Reconsideration of Care: Pursuing Gender-Equal Care for Global Health and Wellbeing.

Our network members are: Susanne Choi of Chinese University of Hong Kong; Cati Coe of Carlton University, Canada; Yuliya Hilevych of Yuliya of University of Groningen, the Netherlands; Rasika Jayasuriya of ANU, Australia; Aya Kitamura of Tokyo University; Agnieszka Kościańska of University of Warsaw, Poland; Helma Lutz of Goethe University, Germany; Nicolette Makovicky of University of Oxford; Matt Withers, ANU, Australia; and Chigusa Yamaura, University of Oxford. Our filmmaker is Burma Mahashweta.

Through a series of online work-in-seminars held during 2025, a hybrid workshop held in O.P. Jindal Global University in 13th February 2026; a video on care in the making, and a hybrid workshop held in Oxford on 20 March 2026, the network members have over the past 12 months explored how gendered inequalities affect human health and wellbeing during care crises and explored ways to reconfigure care through greater equality.

The network has understood care to refer 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.

The team adopted an intersectional 'ethics of care' approach to care and its effects on health and wellbeing. We found this approach 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.

Project details

Start date: March 2025

End date: March 2026

Funder: The Academy of Medical Sciences

Scheme: Networking Grants

Contact/Principal Investigator: Dr Ruchira Sen, Professor Rachel Murphy

 

Oxford Principal Investigator

Rachel has shoulder-length blonde wavy hair and is smiling at the camera. She's wearing a ruby coloured top with silver pendant necklace

Professor Rachel Murphy

Professor of Chinese Development and Society

More information

13th February 2026: A Reconsideration of Care: Pursuing Gender-Equal Care for Health and Well-being in India, hybrid workshop held at O.P. Jindal Global University

At this workshop, the eminent feminist economist and care specialist Professor Jayati Ghosh gave an inspiring keynote lecture about care as infrastructure and care as the unseen sea on which the ship of the economy sails.

Thereafter, a Young Scholars Panel was held to stimulate and support research on the gendering of care in India. Empirically and conceptually rich presentations were as follows:

  • Who Cares for the Care Workers? Reflecting on ASHAs through a Feminist Economics Lens, Asmita Basak, South Asian University, New Delhi
  • Pandemic, Precarity, and Care Work: Gendered Health Experiences of Indian Migrant Nurses in the Gulf during COVID-19, Anagha E, School of Global Affairs, Ambedkar University, Delhi
  • Care and Time Poverty in Rural Rajasthan, Labhisha Meena, PhD candidate, Malaviya National Institute of Technology, Jaipur

The panel’s presentation stimulated new insights into extractions of care through gender, global interconnections in care economies and the implications of conceptualizations of gender and new operationalisations of care for the wellbeing of women and for the care sector more broadly. Discover the full programme.

20th March 2026: A Reconsideration of Care: Pursuing Gender-Equal Care for Health and Well-being, a hybrid workshop held at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford

Presentations at this workshop (please see the list of abstracts) offered rich original granular insights into how care in different realms and different empirical contexts is being re-imagined, gendered and operationalized in response to shifts in the global economy and geopolitics; state retreat from welfare provisioning; demographic transformations, especially fertility decline and population ageing; national ideologies that intersect with shifting gender norms; and adaptive community and family care practices.

Our papers and perspectives covered insights based on research conducted in Australia, China, Germany, Ghana; India, Japan, Poland, the Pacific Islands, and Ukraine.

This breadth enabled the network members to identify unexpected parallels and intersections across regional contexts in how care burdens and care needs are interpreted against a background of intersectional inequalities. Nevertheless, we also observed care innovations derived from lived experiences of care and community formation, and new ways of valuing care in response to wider societal challenges that revealed the constructedness and mutability of the current social order and therefore ways that it can be remade.

Discover the full programme.