‘An Introduction to Caring Democracy’, by Prof. Joan C Tronto
Access Minnesota's Jim Dubois' Interview (July 15, 2014).
Dear Readers and New Subscribers,
As you know, I’m passionate about raising awareness of caregivers' challenges, priming others before a crisis happens, and offering empathy and inspiration to those caring for a loved one today.
In the Resonance section of the website, I share articles, recommendations, and resources based on my personal caregiving experiences and those of others.
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Through these articles, I aim to dispel the myth that carergivers are superhuman. I try to reframe the narrative from ‘not me or us yet’ to ‘we all need to discuss care’: how we manage caregiving as a collective social need, as a family/local community support team AND how we would like to receive our individual, personal care.
In this article, I’m sharing a video of an interview with Professor Joan Tronto.
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.
Summary:
In this 2014 interview, Professor Joan Tronto discusses the concept of care in relation to democracy, arguing that care is a fundamental aspect of human life and society. She emphasises that everyone is both a giver and receiver of care and that care is often undervalued and underpaid, typically falling to lower-status individuals in society. Tronto suggests that addressing this care deficit could involve elevating the status of care work or redistributing it more evenly across society, as the current system marginalises certain groups and threatens democratic principles.
Timestamped transcript of the interview.
0:03 Access Minnesota brings you the newsmakers and the stories that shape our everyday lives with analysis from the University of Minnesota Faculty Experts. Now here's Jim Dubois. The Affordable Care Act continues to generate controversy. Recent polls show that fewer than 40% of Americans approve of the Act, and some members of Congress are calling for fixes or an outright repeal, but the Affordable Care Act debate raises a much broader question: how should a society care for its people and who is responsible for providing that care?
0:41 University of Minnesota political science professor Joan Tronto her recent book titled 'Caring Democracy' looks beyond the politics of healthcare and suggests that overall Americans are facing a care deficit Joan Tronto is a professor and chair of the department of political science at the University of Minnesota she is also the author of the book 1 Professor Tronto.
1:11 Let's start with how you define care and how care relates to democracy.
Joan Tronto: so I define care very broadly this is a project I've been working on for over 20 years and twenty four years ago a colleague and I, Berenice Fischer2 define care as
everything we do to continue, repair and maintain our world so that we may live in it as well as possible,
who are the people in society that need care
and who are the people who give care well
everybody every person is both a giver and a receiver of care. Most of us don’t think of ourselves, with that word. When we think of care as caring activities, we think of ourselves in the heroic role of caregiver, e.g. I take care of my children or as a teacher of my students or doctors take care of patient
But in fact over the course of our lives we are all constantly engaged in the process of giving and receiving care after all we had to get dressed and get to this place and get set up to do this interview and that's care work as well
2:29 Most of us as able-bodied adults do a lot of caring for ourselves so we don't even count it as care but it is the other thing that's fascinating is children as young as 10 months old try to imitate parents and give care back so this Norwegian psychologist named Stein Bråten3 has done this research where he has a caregiver sit at a table with a child feed the child then put the spoon down and of course as they're feeding the child they're going then up and the child of course then opens their mouth when they feed the child they put the spoon down and the child picks up the spoon takes food goes to the adult to try to get the adult to eat in the way that the child has just done.
3:19 there seems to be something almost hardwired in humans about the desire to care for others. Do we as a society have a moral imperative to give care to those who need it?
3:32 So we have to go more slowly than jumping from just there is care? to a moral imperative for society as a whole. In truth, every society has a theory about how care should be organised. I'm a political theorist; when we think of political thought, we often think about organisations or governments; we think about issues of protection in terms of preventing war, and we don't usually think about the fact that every society also has to organise care one way or another.
4:03 Now, historically the usual way to organise care has been to create households and to say let the households take the caring roles and do care within themselves and it's in Aristotle's Politics book one that there's a separation between the household and the political order and the household is the realm where care gets done.
4:26 But as you begin to move out, you realise that no, they're also public forms of care that are also always being given: educating a population is a form of caregiving providing for health, and providing regulations for healthcare, taking care of the young, the sick, the elderly have historically been done either by States or by individual communities or by churches. There are hundreds of ways to organise care but every society has to figure out how to do this.
4:59 How have politicians ignored the issue of care? Okay, so starting in the late nineteenth century, something important happened, and that is care gets professionalized, whereas once upon a time if you gave birth, you did it at home with community women helping you out. Now we have births in hospitals.
It used to be that if you died, your family was responsible for taking care of the arrangements of doing something with your body, and in many societies, that's still true. There might be people in the community there's a whole separate industry to take care of that.
Education has historically in most societies been done in the home, but now we have an educational system.
5:46 So, as you look at it, care began to move out of the household and into the market, into government agencies, and into the state itself in the nineteenth century. As you begin to expand those roles, you can either take them very seriously or you can not.
6:04 Politicians have conceived of these things piece by piece, right oh my gosh, people are beginning to create school systems, we better create a system for taxing to create schools, oh my gosh, we now have hospitals that coming into existence we better pass regulations to manage how the hospitals are built, where they're built, whether there’s training in one place, ornot enough in another.
6:31 So, politicians, as with everything, address issues one at a time as they come up, but the claim that I make in the book, and I think it's a vow, is that it's time for us to step back and as a society ask the question wait we created a whole system of ways of creating and taking care of people is this the way we should really organise it because there's one serious problem that comes in the way we typically organise things and it's not you know because politicians aren't thoughtful
7:03 They're facing this one question at a time. Care work has historically been undervalued as work, and it's been historically underpaid. It's, therefore, also historically been given over to people who aren't of very high status in society: women, slaves, servants, and working-class people. Now, people of colour people of ethnic and racial minorities are the people who end up doing vast amounts of caring work in the United States and for that matter globally
7:42 So the question is, does that mean they're not valuable? Does that mean the care work they're doing is not important? NO, in fact, if they stopped doing their work, the whole society would stop functioning, but if you look at what's valued in society and what gets higher pay and more prestige, it's not those caring jobs now that's a problem.
8:07 We could solve it by elevating those that work. We could solve it by redistributing that work differently so that it's not only put on the worst-paid people as the ones who end up doing it.
8:19 There are many solutions to the problem, but if we're concerned about equality in a democratic society, then having basically excluded a whole bunch of people and saying, ‘You, you take care of that stuff, and we'll talk about the important business here ourselves’ THIS is how we create a set of exclusions and marginalise people that is really threatening to a democratic way of life.
Carer Mentor Commentary:
“There are only four kinds of people in the world—those who have been caregivers, those who are currently caregivers, those who will be caregivers, and those who will need caregivers.” -Rosalynn Carter, Former First Lady of the United States
We can each work to change the narrative in broad social policy by supporting campaigns like Carers UK for carers' rights nationally. We can also, within the context of our individual relationships, talk about care—receiving and giving it—one cup of coffee at a time.
Readdressing the value of care in our communities can shift the hidden care crisis from an individual burden behind closed doors to an open, social collective issue we can solve together.
Let’s start the conversation, share our experiences and wisdom, and call out the inequalities perpetuated today. After all, who do you want caring for you when you cannot care for yourself?
August 24th 2024
Caregivers being valued!!
April 23, 2024. PBS Newshour VP Kamala Harris meets nursing home workers to discuss health care during a campaign event in Wisconsin.
HIGHLY recommend watching. ESPECIALLY from 09.55mins
VP Kamala Harris: articulate, empathetic and understands caregiver’s value.
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Carer Mentor by Victoria is free to read. If you have the means and would like to support the publication, I welcome monthly (£6) and annual (£50) subscriptions. Thank you for your ongoing support.
Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality and Justice. April 2013
Bernice Fisher, and Joan Tronto, “Toward a Feminist Theory of Care” (1990).
Stein Braten https://www.stein-braten.com/
Thanks Victoria! An insightful interview. Strongly agree with the following:
'Care work has historically been undervalued as work, and it's been historically underpaid. It's, therefore, also historically been given over to people who aren't of very high status in society: women, slaves, servants, and working-class people.'
We need a complete recalibration in how we perceive work and the value we attach to it.
Victoria, thank you for sharing this interview. It’s important to see how caring became low-status, poorly paid work once it moved out of the home. Things weren’t always this way.