Creating a political community of fate in care and caregiving
Event Information
With Margaret Levi, Emerita Professor of Political Science, Stanford University
Caregiving is essential to the health and well-being of society. It shapes how we raise our children and how we tend to the ill, elderly, and disabled in our families and communities. We rely on paid caregivers in health care, education, and government services to support those who need care beyond what families can provide. Caregiving is also a fundamental human experience: Almost all of us will both care for others and be cared for during our lives.
But despite the importance of care work in all its forms — paid and unpaid, in our families, in health care, in education and public services — and despite the demographic changes speeding us toward a care crisis, this work has been largely invisible in the social and human sciences.
The solution, argues political scientist Margaret Levi, is to understand care as a widely shared interest and lived experience that can become the basis of an expanded and inclusive community of fate in which people come to recognize a societal responsibility for those in need, even if they are strangers or unlikely to be able to reciprocate. In this talk, Levi will explore the conditions for creating such an expanded and inclusive community of fate in care and the political economic implications of such a strategy.
About the speaker
Margaret Levi is emerita professor of political science at Stanford University and a senior at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. She is the former Sara Miller McCune Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS), where she remains a faculty fellow, and is a senior fellow at the Woods Institute.
Levi’s research explores how organizations and governments provoke member willingness to act beyond material interest. She is the author or coauthor of numerous articles and six books, including most recently, A Moral Political Economy (Cambridge, 2021).
Levi is the winner of the 2019 Johan Skytte Prize and 2020 Falling Walls Prize for Breakthrough of the Year in Social Sciences and Humanities. She became a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences in 2015, the British Academy in 2022, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001, the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 2017, and the American Philosophical Society in 2018. She was a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow in 2002. She served as president of the American Political Science Association from 2004 to 2005.
Levi was the general editor of Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics. She is co-general editor of the Annual Review of Political Science and on the editorial board of PNAS. She serves on the boards of the Berggruen Institute, the Center for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (CEACS), the Research Council of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), and CORE Economics.