CARE: challenges and solutions for a sustainable future- Keynote: Professor Joan Tronto

26th April 2021 'Ending Wealth-Care: The Future of Caring Democracy' Professor Joan Tronto, University of Minnesota Abstract: While many scholars and groups of activists have now begun to outline the main dimensions of a “care economy,” the struggle for such a change also requires a political appeal to governments and voters to enact such a change. This paper seeks to frame our current political economy as a system of “Wealth-Care”: the global political economy is primarily structured to protect and nurture wealth. Describing this system in terms of its values opens up ways to see how a wealth-oriented culture distorts and downplays other forms of care. The paper argues that in order to create sustainable institutions that allow people to care well for one another and for the natural world, we have to refocus our attention away from caring for wealth (which we do too well) to caring for people and the world. Only a deeper and more robust account of democratic caring practices can create the kinds of practices and institutions required to rethink responsibility if the pursuit of wealth is no longer hegemonic, and if the fears and anxieties stirred up by the logic of wealth-care are to be assuaged. Bio: Joan C Tronto is professor emerita of political science at the University of Minnesota and the City University of New York. A graduate of Oberlin College, she received her PhD from Princeton University. She is the author of Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (1993), Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality and Justice (2013), and Who Cares? How to Reshape a Democratic Politics (2015), all of which have been widely translated. She has also authored more than fifty articles about care ethics and serves as a consulting editor for the International Journal of Care and Caring. A Fulbright Fellow in Bologna, Italy in 2007, in 2015, she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University for Humanistic Studies in the Netherlands.