Depletion: The human costs of caring (book launch)

Shirin M. Rai is Distinguished Research Professor, Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS, University of London. She is a Fellow of the British Academy. Rai’s research interests lie in politics and feminist international political economy, performance and politics, and gender and political institutions. She has published widely in these areas, including Gender and the Political Economy of Development (Polity, 2004) Performing Representation: Women Members in the Indian Parliament (with Carole Spary; OUP), 2019; Oxford Handbook of Politics and Performance (2021; co-eds M Gluhovic, S Jestrovic and M Saward). Her latest book is Depletion: the human costs of caring (2024, OUP).

Jayanthi is a Research Associate in the Centre for Care, working on the research strand ‘Borders and Care’. The study examines the role of bordering processes in shaping experiences of care among racially minoritised people in the UK who also have experiences of international migration. Jayanthi’s research interests include feminist and critical historical approaches to the international political economy of development, gender regimes, and violence and conflict. She is especially interested in the ways that structural violence and dispossession connect to and manifest in the everyday; on care as part of social reproduction; and on research at the intersection of ‘crisis’ and ‘development’.

Grace is a Research Associate working on Digital Care in the Centre for Care, with a focus on digital inequalities, the impact of sectoral fragmentation on technology implementation, and the nature of care labour processes. Previously, Grace taught topics of industrial relations and employment in Sheffield University Management School. She has also worked as an employment law adviser at Acas and as a care worker. Her research interests include the effects of digitalisation on forms of care labour; state policy on care provision and employment regulation; trade union strategies within the social care sector and theorisations of unionism; and labour theory of value and analyses of capital.

Yingzi Shen is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociological Studies. Her research focuses on the family care provided by elder grandparents in migrant workers’ families, who migrate from rural area to big cities in China; and how inter-generational cooperation, migration and public policies affect care equality and carers’ wellbeing. Prior to her PhD, Yingzi studied Journalism and Communication at Peking University in China. Her master’s dissertation examined how the emotional labour of domestic workers is professionalised and controlled by domestic service companies. Yingzi’s PhD is jointly funded by the University of Sheffield Joint China Scholarship Council Scholarship. Read her latest commentary, ‘The glory and stress of Chinese rural migrant grandparents’, here:

https://centreforcare.ac.uk/commentary/2024/03/chinese-rural-migrant-grandparents/

Majella is a Professor of Social Policy and is Research Lead in the Centre for Care for the group ‘Care Trajectories and Constraints’. Her work is in the field of migration studies with particular focus on the intersections between migration and families / care / gender / ageing / geopolitical transformations, which she approaches from sociological and social policy perspectives. These interests coalesce in different configurations around three key areas: transnational families, transnational political economy of care and migration and transformations. She works with groups traditionally seen as ‘marginalised’ / ‘excluded’ / ‘disadvantaged’, including older people with a migrant background, young migrants and asylum seekers and migrant care workers.