Focus on how caregiving in all of its forms serves to create the economic — derived from the Greek oikos for home — points to how the economic should be conceptualized, not as something outside of the interactions between people that make lives livable and sustain them, but as produced through those activities. The oiko-nomic, puts the private sphere of the home and its caregiving activities at the forefront of the economic; it situates care as the basis of society, both that which makes the social possible and as the set of processes that must be protected at all costs in order to ensure that society persists. Not so much a social safety net as the firmament that everyday life is made possible through, an economy of care emphasizes not what is currently viable but what must become possible to ensure a futurity to human life — in and beyond the wages of anthropogenic climate change.
It is in that spirit that the essays in the new book “Proposals for a Caring Economy” have been collected; not to merely make an argument about facts on the ground, but to reconceptualize the ground altogether and make a better, more inclusive world possible with a focus on care at its foundation.
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