This book brings together a decade of interviews with key feminist academics. Through sensitive and nuanced conversations, Jo Littler brings to life actions, arguments and solutions generated by diverse feminist thinkers on the left. Beginning as an interview series for the journal Soundings, this collection has since grown into one of the most vibrant, interesting and accessible records of feminist theory and action in recent years. The conversations in Left Feminisms explore the complex relationships between the personal and the political. Academic and activist journeys of the interviewees are interwoven with analysis of social and cultural change and strategies for solidarity. From discussions of the gendered dynamics of the far right in the US, to sexism and racism in UK academia, to organising against household debt in Argentina, the book offers a range of insights that traverse a broad spectrum of feminist politics in the twenty-first century. Including interviews with Nancy Fraser, Gargi Bhattacharyya, Sheila Rowbotham and Verónica Gago, this collection is an important archive in its own right. It will be indispensable to feminist activists, academics and anyone interested in the history and present of feminism on the left.
Jo Littler Books
We are in the midst of a global crisis of care. How do we get out of it?The Care Manifesto puts care at the heart of the debates of our current crisis: from intimate care--childcare, healthcare, elder care--to care for the natural world. We live in a world where carelessness reigns, but it does not have to be this way.The Care Manifesto puts forth a vision for a truly caring world. The authors want to reimagine the role of care in our everyday lives, making it the organising principle in every dimension and at every scale of life. We are all dependent on each other, and only by nurturing these interdependencies can we cultivate a world in which each and every one of us can not only live but thrive.The Care Manifesto demands that we must put care at the heart of the state and the economy. A caring government must promote collective joy, not the satisfaction of individual desire. This means the transformation of how we organise work through co-operatives, localism and nationalisation. It proposes the expansion of our understanding of kinship for a more 'promiscuous care'. It calls for caring places through the reclamation of public space, to make a more convivial city. It sets out an agenda for the environment, most urgent of all, putting care at the centre of our relationship to the natural world.