Dr. Robert Gottlieb will talk about his new book Care-Centered Politics: From Home to the Planet on Thursday, Oct. 20, from 5-6:30 p.m. in Goodwin Forum (Nelson Hall East 102) on the Cal Poly Humboldt campus.

This agenda-setting book presents a framework for creating a more just and equitable care-centered world. Climate change, pandemic events, systemic racism, and deep inequalities have all underscored the centrality of care in our lives. Yet care work is, for the most part, undervalued and exploited. In this book, Robert Gottlieb examines how a care economy and care politics can influence and remake health, climate, and environmental policy, as well as the institutions and practices of daily life. He shows how, through this care-centered politics, we can build an ethics of care and a society of cooperation, sharing, and solidarity.

Arguing that care is a form of labor, Gottlieb expands the ways we think about home care, child care, elder care, and other care relationships. He links them to the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, immigration, and the militarization of daily life. He also provides perspective on the events of 2020 and 2021 (including the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and movements calling attention to racism and inequality) as they relate to a care politics. Care, says Gottlieb, must be universal—whether healthcare for all, care for the earth, care at work, or care for the household, shared equally by men and women. Care-centered politics is about strategic and structural reforms that imply radical and revolutionary change. Gottlieb offers a practical, mindful, yet also utopian, politics of daily life.

Gottlieb is a Research Associate in Humboldt's Department of Politics and Professor Emeritus of Urban and Environmental Policy at Occidental College. He's published groundbreaking work on environmental justice, including the books Forcing the Spring, Environmentalism Unbound, Food Justice, and more. 

This talk is organized by the Department of Politics and the Department of Environmental Studies; it is co-sponsored by the Departments of Philosophy and of Sociology.