Depletion: the human costs of caring

When thinking about the work of caring for others we often neglect the human cost born by those performing this care.

Feminists have long talked about the ways in which unpaid work, particularly performed in the home, is habitually undervalued by society; but the work of caring for people, both paid and unpaid, can also take a toll on the health of individuals, households, and communities when we give more than we receive. This lopsided gap between outflows and inflows, as this book argues, is depletion.
In Depletion, Shirin M. Rai examines the human costs of care work and how these are reproduced across the boundaries of class, race, gender, and generation. Depletion can be physical, as measured by the body mass index, exhaustion, sleeplessness, and vital health signs. It can also be mental, manifesting as self-doubt, guilt and apprehension, and the failure to take time for oneself, family, friends, and community. Moreover, depletion has effects that extend well beyond the individual, to households and communities.
Including case studies from different parts of the world and building on various methodologies, Rai looks at the costs of care work, or what she calls "social reproduction" in several forms: biological reproduction, unpaid work in the home, and cultural and ideological work necessary to maintain social relations beyond the household. Various chapters examine the costs of commuting to work and for care, the value of unpaid work performed by women of different classes, the costs of household work performed by children, and the costs to communities when local economies are challenged by corporate interests.

Lastly, Rai argues that depletion must be recognized in order for it to be reversed--the struggles to reverse depletion are struggles for a good life, generative of new imaginings of how care work, both draining and joyful, can be reorganized for a better future for all.

Shirin M. Rai is Distinguished Research Professor, Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS, University of London. She is a Fellow of the British Academy. Rai has written extensively on issues of gender in/equality, political economy, care and caring, and also on women's participation in politics. Rai’s research interests lie in politics and feminist international political economy, performance and politics, and gender and political institutions. Her latest book is Depletion: the human costs of caring (2024, OUP).

Naila Kabeer is Professor of Gender and Development at the Department of International Development at LSE, University of London. Naila is also a Faculty Associate at LSE’s International Inequalities Institute and on the governing board of the Atlantic Fellowship for Social and Economic Equity. She has done extensive advisory work with international agencies (World Bank, ADB, UNDP, UN Women), bilateral agencies (DFID, SIDA, CIDA, IDRC) and NGOs (Oxfam, Action Aid, BRAC, PRADAN and Nijera Kori).

Katherine Brickell is Professor of Urban Studies at King's College London. Her feminist-oriented research on precarious home and working lives focuses closely on household debt and over-indebtedness in Cambodia and the United Kingdom. Katherine’s books include Home SOS: Gender, Violence and Survival in Crisis Ordinary Cambodia (2020), The Handbook of Displacement (2020), The Handbook of Contemporary Cambodia (2020), Geographies of Forced Eviction (2017), and Translocal Geographies (2011).

Sara Stevano is a development and feminist political economist. She is a Senior Lecturer in Economics at SOAS University of London. Her areas of study are the political economy of work, food and nutrition, inequalities and social reproduction. Her work focuses on Africa, with primary research experience in Mozambique and Ghana. Sara is committed to expanding the boundaries of economic research and teaching through interdisciplinary approaches, qualitative methods and micro-macro bridges.

Asma Abdi is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study (IAS) at the University of Warwick. Her research and teaching interests revolve around the intersections of global political economy, feminist theory, and post/decolonial approaches. She specialises in exploring the intersections of gender, race, and sexuality concerning questions of labour, social reproduction, informal economies, the everyday and women’s movements in the Global South, with a specific focus, so far, on the Middle East/Iran.

Kate Bedford is an interdisciplinary scholar with a background in political economy, development, socio-legal studies, and gender/sexuality studies. Her main area of expertise is international development. She has been researching the consequences of the turn to law within gender and development. My development research has been funded by the Ford Foundation, Overbrook Foundation, UNRISD, and the RCUK.

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