Young Research Group

In a new article in Gender, Place, and Culture, led by former Cornell grad student and now Prof Youjin Chung, we challenge current notions of unpaid care work, particularly as it is measured in time. Based on participatory research in Singida, Tanzania (yes, as in SNAP-Tz), we propose the need for understanding the conditions and context in which unpaid care work is done, and argue for a more nuanced way of understanding the mainstream view of unpaid care work to be only “oppressive” or a “burden”.

“We argue that the universalistic and capitalocentric assumptions laden in the dominant policy discourse belie the diversity of the lived experiences and subjective meanings of UCW often performed by women and girls in different cultural and geographical contexts, particularly in the predominantly agrarian global South.”