Join us to celebrate the launch of Shirin M. Rai’s Depletion. The book examines the human costs of caring, how these are reproduced across the boundaries of class, race, gender, and generation and how might they be reversed.  

Depletion examines the human costs of care and caring and how these are reproduced across the boundaries of class, race and gender as well as across generations. It argues that if unrecognized, depletion erodes individual lives as well as social institutions (family, community groups and our ecologies), which is generative of harm - historic, present and anticipatory - at each of these levels. Consent does not mitigate this harm. With case studies from different parts of the world, and building on various methodologies, the book shows how depletion is both a contributing factor and an outcome of economic, environmental, health and social crises. This book is a strong indictment of taking the work of care for granted at the cost of the lives of those who perform it. It argues that the struggles to reverse depletion are struggles for a good life, generative of new imaginings of how this work of care, both draining and joyful, can be reorganised for a better future for all. 

Get your free ticket here. This event is co-hosted by AFSEE. 

Meet our speakers and chair

Juanita Elias is Professor of International Political Economy in the Department of Politics & International Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. Her research and teaching expertise are in the areas of feminist political economy, migration and employment, and Southeast Asian political economy. She has published her research widely including in highly ranked international academic journals. Her most recent book publications are I-PEEL: International Political Economy of Everyday Life co-authored with James Brassett, Lena Rethel and Ben Richardson (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Gender Politics and the Pursuit of Competitiveness in Malaysia (Routledge 2020). She has held research grants from the British Council, Innovate UK and the Australian Research Council. She is vice chair of the British International Studies Association and an editor at Review of International Political Economy.

Professor Diane Elson is an internationally known researcher on gender equality and economic development. She is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex. She has held visiting appointments at Rutgers University, University of the Ruhr, University of South Australia and Carleton University, Ottawa. In 2016 she was awarded the Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought and in 2018, the International Book Prize, Japan Society of Political Economy. Professor Elson has served as a member of the UN Committee for Development Policy and consultant to UN Women. She has been Vice-President of the International Association for Feminist Economics (2004-6). A chapter on her work is included in Fifty Key Thinkers on Development (edited by D. Simon, published by Routledge in 2006).She has published widely on gender equality and economic policy, including articles in World Development, Journal of International Development, Feminist Economics, Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, and International Review of Applied Economics. Her recent books include Harvesting Feminist Knowledge for Public Policy (co-edited with D. Jain); Human Rights and the Capabilities Approach (co -edited with S. Fukuda-Parr and P. Vizard); Financial Governance from a Feminist Perspective (co -edited with B. Young and I. Bakker); and Rethinking Economics for Social Justice: The Radical Potential of Human Rights (co-authored with R. Balakrishnan and J. Heintz).

Sumi Madhok is Professor of Political Theory and Gender Studies and Head of the LSE Department of Gender Studies. Her work combines theoretical, conceptual and philosophical investigations with detailed ethnographies of the lived experiences, political subjectivation, and political struggles for rights and justice, specifically, in South Asia. She is most recently the author of Vernacular Rights Cultures: The Politics of Origins, Human Rights and Gendered Struggles for Justice (Cambridge University Press 2021), which won both the Susan Strange Book Prize and Sussex International Theory Prize in 2022. Professor Madhok is also the author of Rethinking Agency: Developmentalism, Gender and Rights (2013); the co-editor of Gender, Agency and Coercion (2013); and of the Sage Handbook of Feminist Theory (2014).

Ania Plomien is Associate Professor in Gender and Social Science and Deputy Head of Department (Research) in the LSE Department of Gender Studies, and Deputy Director of the Research Programme on Gender Justice and the Wellbeing Economy. Her feminist political economy research centres on the problem of neoliberalisation of the state and the crisis of social reproduction in Europe, in particular via market-reach into care, food and housing provisioning and the associated gendered harms. She is the co-author of Gender, Migration and Domestic Work: Masculinities, Male Labour and Fathering in the UK and USA (2013) and co-editor of The Sage Handbook of Feminist Theory (2014).

Shirin M Rai, FBA, is Distinguished Research Professor in the department of Politics and International Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and a Fellow of the British Academy. Her research interests are in the fields of political economy of development, gender and political institutions and performance and politics. Her recent books include the Oxford Handbook of Politics and Performance (2021; co-eds M Gluhovic, S Jestrovic and M Saward) and Performing Representation: Women Members in the Indian Parliament (with Carole Spary; OUP), 2019. She is currently working on a book titled Doing Politics Sideways. Depletion: the human costs of caring (OUP) explores the multiple facets of social reproductive work and argues that its undervaluing depletes those who perform this work. Struggles to reverse depletion are struggles for a good life, generative of new imaginings of how this work of care, both draining and joyful, can be reorganised.

Christopher Choong Weng Wai is a PhD candidate at the University of Warwick and a recipient of the Chancellor’s International Scholarship. He is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity at the International Inequalities Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science, and Deputy Director of Research at Khazanah Research Institute in Malaysia (currently on study leave). He was previously Economist/Programme Manager for the UNDP Country Office of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei Darussalam. He holds an MSc Inequalities and Social Science from the London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London (Distinction); MSc in Development Economics from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (Distinction); and a BSc in Economics from the University of Malaya (Distinction). His PhD research is on the everyday political economy of racial/gender capitalism in Malaysia. He is supervised by Juanita Elias and Lena Rethel.