Care/Work: Care Workers and Care Economies at and Beyond the University

Catalog description

Feminist literature has identified care work – “everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible” – as central to the organization of society. This approach has placed care at the center of such diverse domains as social life, reproduction and aging, health and medicine, activism and politics, even environmental change. This capstone encourages students to explore care work through the lens of Philadelphia and the university, either through engaging archival materials at Penn Libraries or through ethnographic or other research modalities. A central goal of the course is to give students the opportunity to do intensive original research, with frequent feedback and guidance. Importantly, while the capstone papers that are developed in the course of the semester will take care work as a focus, the papers will be primarily historical and/or social in their focus and mode of analysis. They will thus engage questions such as: what does care look like in practice? What is the relationship between care work and politics? What are the uses and limits of care work as an analytic framework? How have historians, anthropologists, and others thought about care work in the past and how do new developments challenge these understandings? Students will be encouraged to focus their thesis on an existing body of research data such as archival materials, which will be explored throughout the semester and which can also be supplemented through additional research strategies. Additionally, students will locate, read, and make use of relevant secondary literature from fields such as history, sociology, anthropology, and allied fields.