Part-Time for All. A Care Manifesto

Book Launch / Discussion:

Part-Time for All

A Care Manifesto

Jennifer Nedelsky, York University &

Tom Malleson, King’s University College

WHEN: Friday 1 December 2023

8.30am - 10am EST / 1.30pm - 3pm GMT / 7pm - 8.30pm IST

WHERE: MS Teams

Part-Time for All offers solutions to four pressing problems: inequality forcare-givers; family stress from demands of work and care; chronic timescarcity; and policy makers who are ignorant of care and care-givers with littleaccess to policy making—the care/policy divide. Only a radical restructuring ofboth work and care can redress all these problems. We propose new norms:no one does paid work for more than 30 hours a week, and everyonecontributes roughly 22 hours of unpaid care to family, friends, or their chosencommunity of care. Other approaches provide only partial solutions. Forexample, wages for housework, or excellent daycare, or flexible work hourswould not overcome the care/policy divide. We explain why everyone needsto acquire the knowledge and dispositions that come from the sustainedexperience of providing care throughout one’s life. We show how work can betransformed to allow time for care giving, and how these new norms willgenerate a cultural shift in the value accorded care. While we focus primarilyon human-to-human care, we include care for the earth. The final twochapters describe how these processes of transformation could be feasiblyaccomplished and why these changes are possible in high-income countrieswithin our current global economy. Every one of our proposals already existsin at least one country; the task is to integrate the key reforms and scale themup. Given the magnitude of the current problems, deep changes are needed.Part-Time for All offers a feasible path forward.

Seminar speaker:

Jennifer Nedelsky received her Ph.D from the Interdisciplinary Committee on Social Thought at the University ofChicago in 1977. She began her full-time teaching career in 1979 at the Politics Department at Princeton University. Shejoined the University of Toronto in 1985 and held a joint appointment between the Faculty of Law and the Departmentof Political Science until 2018. She left to join Osgoode Hall Law School at York University in part because Osgoodecreated a 50% appointment for her. Her first book was Private Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism,followed by Law’s Relations: A Relational Theory of Self, Autonomy, and Law (2011). Her latest book is jointly authoredwith Tom Malleson, Part Time for All: A Care Manifesto (Oxford University Press, 2023). She is now returning to herbook manuscript, “Judgment in Law and Life,” building on the unfinished theory of judgment of Hannah Arendt, herdissertation supervisor. She is also returning to her work on property, to re-envision property law as founded on a senseof mutual care for and from the earth. The property project will be part of a larger project on revisioningconstitutionalism from a more than human perspective. She is married to Joe Carens and the mother of two sons,Michael (1987) and Daniel (1990); their care and relationship have shaped all her work.

The Laws of Social Reproduction

project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon2020 research and innovation programme (under grant agreement No. 772946).

For more information about the project, please email Prabha.kotiswaran@kcl.ac.uk.