Whether tendered as an intimately interpersonal exchange or in the form of technological and institutional interventions, care is constituted by quasi-economic practices of valuation and exchange. The work of care is also animated by economic and financial dynamics: caring practices are increasingly subject to commodification, rationalization, stratification, automation, and AI-ification/big data-fication. The COVID-19 pandemic has also revealed macroeconomies of care where regimes of value, ministration, provision, dispossession, and affective investment are established, contested, and endured.

Articulating with the conference theme “Good Relations,” this panel invites interdisciplinary reflections on the ambivalent, generative relationship between the concepts of “care” and “economy.” Submissions might explore individual case studies of “caring economies” and/or theorize and speculate more generally:

– How do practices of care function quasi-economically, empowering or dispossessing their agents and subjects?
– How do the values, perspectives, and methods of “the dismal science” affect social practices of giving and receiving care?
– How and where do caring practices intersect with economic forms and circulations? How and where are economies founded on practices of care? How, and to what ends, has care become economized, financialized, and commodified?
– How are caring economies scientized and rationalized, and to what ends?
– How do economic activities, discourses, and practices enable the provision or withholding of care?
– How do caring economies interact with established and emerging technologies for the care of others or the self?