SOC352H5 Lecture 1: Lecture 1
1
Lecture 1
Intersectionality
• Considering the other factors that may affect a person’s life and their experiences
• How might an intersectional lens change our understanding of care?
• The idea that we can experience both power and oppression simultaneously
o Depending on the social location
o How you relate to the people around you
What is care
• Two components of care
o An emotional investment in a person’s wellbeing
o A desire to take actions that will benefit that person
• Empathy vs. care
o Empathy: does not necessarily involve caring, e.g. I feel your pain, but I’m not
going to do anything to help solve the problem
• Care work can be both paid and unpaid
• Unpaid care work is an important aspect of economic activity and contributes to the
wellbeing of individuals and family and society
• But unpaid care work is not considered in policy agendas
o This is because the value of care work is hard to quantify
Why should we care about care?
• Important factor that contributes to the wellbeing of individuals, their families and
societies more broadly
• Can provide a sense of fulfillment, but it can also be a burden
• Often invisible and undervalued
• Women typically spend disproportionately more time on unpaid care work than men
o Usually done in addition to paid work, called the double shift
• Can impact labour force participation
o Because of this disproportionate amount of care work, their paid labour work is
undervalued, as they have to take more time out of their paid work to care for
their families
o Can impact the wage gap between men and women, especially if we consider
other factors like race and indigenous people
Questions going forward:
• How can we move towards a world in which individuals and society recognize and value
the importance of different forms of care
• How do we recognize the importance of care work without reinforcing it’s women’s
work
