Social reproduction scholars have made headway in integrating the analysis of capitalism, class, gender, and care. We offer two contributions to this literature. First, we provide a novel framework with insights into companies as sites of decommodification, shaping childcare cost distribution and affecting childbearing rates. Second, we extend social reproduction research geographically to the oft-overlooked region of Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe is home to 15 of the world’s 20 fastest-declining populations, with low fertility as a prime cause. We argue that privatization catalyzes commodification, raising work intensity and financial-temporal uncertainty and eroding collective resources for social reproduction, thereby impacting childbearing. We explore this mechanism quantitatively by employing four distinct definitions of privatization across two datasets: one covering 52 Hungarian towns (1989–2006) and another spanning 29 postsocialist countries (1989–2012). We shed light on the details of the mechanism through a qualitative analysis of 82 life-history interviews in four Hungarian towns, surveying the lived experience of privatization.

This article conceives of the prevalence of death occurring during the COVID-19 pandemic in older people’s care homes in the United Kingdom (UK) through the lens of necrocapitalism. There is significant evidence that pre-pandemic marketisation policies have structured endemic neglect in the sector, but these generalised failures are frequently not highlighted in the debates around the causes of COVID-19 deaths. The article seeks to specify the way caring has been re-fashioned through a specific form of necrotic privatisation, resting on degrading the intensity of caring, institutionalised via market-orientated regulation. COVID-19 fatalities in older people’s services are necrocapitalist as pre-existing the pandemic the sector was defined by forms of slow violence, exacerbated during the crisis. The de-regulation and cost-saving at the heart of commodified care denigrate older people’s existence, reorienting the value of care in terms of its potential to generate profit.

In sociology, aesthetics have become an important lens for exploring the sensory dimensions of political and economic processes, with research on urban aesthetics contributing significantly to this field. However, much of this work focuses on how aesthetic forms serve the interests of political and economic elites, portraying aesthetic value as a direct product of political ideologies. While these approaches have shown that urban aesthetics are shaped by power struggles, they pay limited theoretical attention to less straightforward aspects of aesthetic politics—such as cases where clashing values, imperatives, and commitments meet. This gap is particularly pronounced in places shaped by violent histories, where the value of urban beauty might be inevitably entangled with loss, ambivalence, and co-existence with unwanted materialities. This article proposes an approach that foregrounds the dilemmas and compromises inherent in urban aesthetic politics, focusing on the varied practices through which people negotiate how to care for urban aesthetic value over time. I develop this approach through a case study of Klaipėda, Lithuania—a city shaped by layered aesthetic transformations, from state annexation to socialist modernisation to post-Soviet nation-building and Europeanisation. Using mixed-methods research, the article highlights differences in how people articulate what counts as good and bad aesthetics and which forms of material care—or neglect—are “appropriate” to sustain the city’s desirable aesthetic appeal. In doing so, the article reveals complex gradations of value underlying seemingly coherent aesthetic ideals of Europeanness.

Contemplative practices offer a promising lens for thinking about how people navigate change, vulnerability, and the emotional texture of later life. This article examines how such practices extend ideas of healthy aging, drawing on interviews and focus groups (n = 24) from an 8-week mind–body course. Participants reported strong satisfaction with the course, noting improvements in physical and mental health, and a notable shift towards greater kindness, openness, and curiosity towards themselves and others. Aiming to understand the key elements of contemplative training, our analysis identified three notable themes: learning to be with emotionally challenging experiences; normalizing change and vulnerability; and the ongoing development of a toolkit. Participants also reported a heightened ability to cope with challenges, make intentional life choices, and foster a positive attitude. From a gerontological perspective, the program offered helpful resources for adapting to change and embracing vulnerability as fundamental components of healthy aging. We also suggest the value of a life course perspective, which enables us to imagine contemplative practice as a form of training for aging well.

This article explores a feminist chronopolitics of care through tracing the (missing) links between care, time and democracy. In democratic and care theories, temporalities have mostly been theorized regarding duration and speed. To extend this limited understanding of democratic and caring temporalities, the article draws on feminist theories of time to theorize the temporalities of care. Drawing on the concept of caring democracy, which centers dependencies and caring relationships, the article expands its limited temporal understanding. The emphasis on the temporalities of care challenges hegemonic temporal regimes based on linear clock-time in capitalist societies. Instead, it proposes reflecting on the multiple temporalities of care and integrating them into democratic processes. This might allow for a move toward a gender- and time-just caring democracy through what I propose to call feminist chronopolitics.

This paper seeks to reconstruct the specific experiences that strengthen or erode the commitment of volunteers in the welfare sector. The empirical basis is narrative interviews with volunteers who have withdrawn from their role at a welfare organisation in Germany. The findings show tensions: on the one hand, experiences of successful relationships with clients and fellow volunteers strengthen volunteers’ commitment. On the other hand, volunteers observe practices and approaches that run counter to their values. This tension between engaging and disengaging experiences arises from the welfare sector itself, for while care can enable close interpersonal experiences, it is also shaped by economisation. Overall, our study shows that the motivations underlying volunteers’ long-term commitment can be both strengthened and undermined by actual volunteering experiences. In the light of our findings, we present heuristics for understanding volunteering processes that focus on field-specific experiences and tensions.

This paper describes the theoretical foundations, empirical findings, and practical and philosophical implications of the Boston Area Diary Study (BADS), a study of the caring behavior of 44 participants over one calendar year. In particular, the paper presents an identification theory of care and discusses how it shaped the conceptualization, collection, and analysis of the data in a year-long diary study of daily voluntary assistance. The findings from the BADS (1) theoretically confirm the identification theory of care; (2) methodologically capture how individuals perceive and carry out caring behavior as a unity; and (3) empirically document the existence of a moral citizenship in America that is substantially more vigorous than is implied by the usual indicators of civic and political citizenship.

Multiple interrelated global crises challenge political thinkers and activists to engage with temporality. Taking the diagnosis of already unfolding planetary environmental catastrophe seriously, climate activists and environmental scholars in the Global North have increasingly focused on experiences of irredeemable loss. These “postapocalyptic” discourses draw on Indigenous, decolonial, and feminist engagements with temporality to highlight the interconnections between different temporal scales, speeds, and rhythms in the Anthropocene. Moreover, the notion of the postapocalyptic present offers an analytical link between historical narratives about the development of extractive capitalism and social “lived” temporalities of mourning, care, and disruption. Feminist debates about the limits and possibilities of social (care-) strikes here provide important insights about the need to interrupt dominant temporal regimes defined by an incessant drive for heightened economic productivity. Disruptive and prefigurative political practices can in turn create room for experimentation with more sustainable and caring forms of societal organization in a diminished present.

This article offers new insights on Africa-China relations and discourses of authenticity and intellectual property by examining the trade and consumption of Chinese-made fashion goods in Mozambique from an ethics perspective. Ethnographic fieldwork in southern Mozambique between 2017 and 2024 shows that many traders and consumers see Chinese counterfeits as beneficial and desirable, enabling them to participate in fashion systems from which they have long been excluded. For traders and consumers in Mozambique, it is ethically right to supply and purchase functional, adequate-quality, and aesthetically pleasing counterfeits. These goods are evaluated less in terms of legality than through pragmatic, everyday judgments about quality, care, and access. The Mozambican case complicates dominant narratives of Chinese-African trade and global intellectual property governance, showing how ethics of access and quality shape everyday globalization.