Annie MacDonald Langstaff workshop - Part-Time For All: A Care Manifesto

This event is co-sponsored by the Labour Law and Development Research Laboratory

Abstract:

You are invited to join in an interactive discussion of Prof. Nedelsky's new book, Part-Time For All (Oxford University Press, 2023), as part of the Annie MacDonald Langstaff workshop series. Participants are encouraged to read the first two chapters of this book (available via the McGill library) in advance of the workshop. 

Part Time for All offers solutions to four pressing problems:  inequality for care-givers; family stress from demands of work and care; chronic time scarcity; policy makers who are ignorant of care and care-givers with little access to policy making -- the care/policy divide. Only a radical restructuring of both work and care can redress all these problems. 

 The book proposes new norms: no one does paid work for more than 30 hours a week, and everyone contributes roughly 22 hours of unpaid care to family, friends, or their chosen community of care. Other approaches provide only partial solutions.  For example, wages for housework, or excellent daycare, or flexible work hours would not overcome the care/policy divide. It also explains why everyone needs to acquire the knowledge and dispositions that come from the sustained experience of providing care throughout one’s life. Throughout the book, Prof. Nedelsky and co-author Tom Malleson show how work can be transformed to allow time for care giving, and how these new norms will generate a cultural shift in the value accorded care. While the book focuses primarily on human-to-human care, the authors also include care for the earth. Indeed, the transformations needed to respond to climate change cannot happen without a deep shift in values, with revaluing care at the heart of the shift. 

Bio:

Jennifer Nedelsky received her Ph.D from the interdisciplinary Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago in 1977. She began her full-time teaching career in 1979 at the Politics Department at Princeton University. She joined the University of Toronto in 1985 and held a joint appointment between the Faculty of Law and the Department of Political Science until 2018. She left to join Osgoode Hall Law School at York University in part because Osgoode created 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 authored with Tom Malleson, Part Time for All: A Care Manifesto (Oxford University Press, 2023). She is now returning to her book manuscript, “Judgment in Law and Life,” building on the unfinished theory of judgment of Hannah Arendt, her dissertation supervisor. She is also returning to her work on property, to re-envision property law as founded on a sense of mutual care for and from the earth. The property project will be part of a larger project on revisioning constitutionalism 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. 

Light refreshments will be served