Navigating Fractured Intimacies and Precarious Care Regimes in South Asia
Dr Sayendri Panchadhyayi and the Centre for Care are delighted to invite you to an online event exploring ‘Navigating Fractured Intimacies and Precarious Care Regimes in South Asia’.
Date: 22nd June 2026
Time: 3pm- 6pm BST
Where: online event, please register your place here using a Google form.
About the event
In a neoliberal world defined by “cold modernity” care has been relegated to the margins. We live in an era of retracted welfarism, where the state views the need for care—whether for a child, a person with a disability, or older people—as a private burden, personal responsibility rather than a public good. Current governance favours “productive” bodies and espouses “hyper-individualism”. Particularly in the Majority World of South Asia, displacement and disfranchisement due to geopolitical tensions and weakening democracies, resistance movements against the political elites, shift towards fundamentalism and tribalism, families living apart in the wake of translocal and transnational migration, divestment of budget from welfare to profiteering sectors, thrust for the AgeTech industry and increasing digital inequalities, and planetary polycrisis and its disproportionate impact on the marginal communities within South Asia are more pronounced than ever. Though care is the essence of life and being, a rapidly changing world reeks of care-lessness and demands our urgent attention to ‘thinking with care’ with a conscious effort to break the ‘silos’ and foster solidarity beyond human-centredness.
Care is not a stage of life; it is a lifelong requirement. This concept note argues that the crisis across the life course or targeted groups is merely the culmination of a life lived under a failed care regime compounded by the wave of imperialist ambitions.
Keeping this exigency at its heart, this seminar will bring together academicians, ECRs, activists, policy makers and thinkers to tease out and ponder what it means to care for and think with care in this emerging world-order. To move the centrality of Anglo-Saxon origin language in communication and dissemination of information and align to the thematic spirit of this seminar, speakers are encouraged to present their work in a bilingual mode whereby they will share their transcripts in advance with the attendees for an immersive osmosis of knowledge.
Speakers and abstracts
Who Cares When Families Can’t? Ageing and the Limits of Household Care in Sri Lanka
Nadiya Najab, Lead Analyst in Socio-Economics, Verité Research. Click here to read abstract and biography.
Addressing Childcare Missing Market for Low-Income Parents: Experimental Evidence from Urban Dhaka
Munshi Sulaiman, Director of Research and a Professor at BRAC Institute of Governance and Development. Click here to read abstract and biography.
Negotiating Care in the Margins: Informal Childcare and Women’s Work in Low-Income Urban Dhaka
Taslima Aktar, Senior Research Associate in the Governance and Politics cluster at the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development. Click here to read abstract and biography.
The World of Paid Domestic Work: Problems and Prospects
Maya John, University of Delhi. Click here to read abstract and biography.
Public Investment in the Care Economy in Nepal: Advancing Decent Work for Women
Kripa Basnyat, Senior Fellow for Social and Economic Equity based at London School of Economics and Political Science. Click here to read abstract and biography.
Creating Infrastructures of Harm: Mythmaking and the Financialization of Hospitals
Devi Vijay, Professor at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. Click here to read abstract and biography.
Care as Resistance: Reimagining Survival, Solidarity, and Political Belonging in Pakistan
Adeela Zaka, sociologist and doctoral researcher at Tu Dortmund University, Germany. Click here to read abstract and biography.
