#rp24 speaker Emilia Roig: A paradigm shift from capital to love

Childcare, supporting relatives, but also helping friends, household tasks or organising everyday life – these are all activities that are indispensable to society. However, unpaid care work is usually underestimated in economic statistics. When we talk about "work", we still almost exclusively mean paid employment.

Political scientist Emilia Roig is convinced that we need a radical paradigm shift that prioritises care over capital. Care work is primarily carried out by women worldwide, which not only has consequences for their pensions, but also for the labour market. This unequal distribution of unpaid work is also "one of the most persistent brakes on gender equality", explained the organisation UN Women Germany. Furthermore, paid care work usually takes place in the low-wage sector. On top of this, women work more hours overall than men when we add up paid and unpaid work. There is an indicator for these facts: the gender care gap.

At re:publica, Emilia will talk about how we can move care work from the periphery to the centre of society. It will be about what a vision for the future could look like – and what marriage as an institution has to do with it.

Emilia Roig is the author of the bestsellers "Why we matter" and "Das Ende der Ehe" (The end of marriage). She is committed to encouraging people to break free from systems of oppression and change the collective consciousness. She has taught at universities in France, Germany and the USA on intersectionality theory, postcolonial studies, critical race theory, queer feminism and international and European law. Prior to her doctorate, she worked on human rights issues at the United Nations in Tanzania and Uganda, at GIZ in Cambodia and at Amnesty International in Germany. 

In 2017, she founded the Centre for Intersectional Justice (CIJ). She was voted "Most Influential Woman of the Year" at the Impact of Diversity Award in 2022. Emilia Roig has been a Research Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies at Heidelberg University since January 2023.

At #rp24, we look forward to finding new ways with Emilia to help care work achieve the social recognition it deserves.