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Seminar: Conversations on Social Reproduction

BOOK LAUNCH: Transnationalization of healthcare work, care extraction and struggles of Indian health workers at a crossroads.

EDITORS: Dr. Maya John, Assistant Professor of History at University of Delhi and Dr Christa Wichterich, University of Kassel

READER: Professor Nicola Yeates, Professor of Social Policy, OU

WHEN: Friday, March 3rd, 12:00-13:30 GMT/17:30-19:00 IST

Book Note: The recent global pandemic highlighted the crucial role played by predominantly female care workers in providing health services across the world. At the same time, it exposed the deep vulnerabilities and precarities of their lives—abysmally low wages, long working hours, social prejudice, notorious undervaluation—at the hands of an uncaring and exploitative economic system. The editors of this volume identify this as 'care extractivism', a strategy that enables the simultaneous extraction and undervaluation of care work, something in which governments and societies are both complicit. Herein, the book highlights certain interlocking dimensions and inequalities which are contributing to the unfolding phenomena of transnational healthcare and a deeply segmented nursing labour market.

Further, this work points to the impact of liberalization and professionalization on the political economy of nursing wherein the market principle of cost efficiency leads to informalization, massive hiring of contract labour, and hierarchization within nursing in both private and public—funded hospitals. The effort has been towards drawing attention to the varied histories of health care work in India and of Indian nurses abroad. In this regard, be it in the context of the nursing labour market in India or in the context of the transnational nursing labour market, the present political economy of nursing is examined as a constantly changing/evolving one. Hence, the analysis also draws on the recent struggles through which care workers have tried to improve their working conditions and which represent a silver lining as they imbibe the potential to disrupt the chain of undervaluation, cost cutting, and poor quality healthcare.

The Laws of Social Reproduction project has received funding from the European Union‘s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (under grant agreement No. 772946). For more information about the project, please email Prabha.kotiswaranpkcl.ac.uk.

At this event

Prabha Kotiswaran

Professor of Law & Social Justice

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