Monographs & Edited Collections (4,887 posts)

When social worker Lisa Keefauver became a widow in 2011, she was alarmed to discover that even though 100 percent of us experience loss, we’re living in a grief illiterate world. In her work as a therapist, and in her search for help in the wake of her own loss, Keefauver began to see how the misguided stories we consume about grief lead to unnecessary suffering.

When Tia Levings married at 19 years old, she achieved what her Baptist church had endorsed as her life’s highest calling: becoming a Christian wife. But as her husband embraced the teachings of the Christian patriarchy movement, she became governed by a list of rules she hadn’t bargained for. Her husband controlled her clothing, censored her reading list, demanded to be called “my lord” and subjected her to “physical discipline” — all in the name of Christ.

The Consulting Trap does a deep dive into how governments have become hooked on private consultancy firms with dire consequences for democratic decision-making, public accountability and accessible public services. Hurl and Werner contend that firms like McKinsey, Accenture, KPMG and Deloitte increasingly take responsibility for core public services, trapping governments in cycles of dependency. Through orchestrating tax avoidance for the wealthy while engineering austerity for the rest, they show how these firms have created the foundations for the deepening privatization of the public services, further entrenching their power.

We are in a crisis of care, one that needs an immediate response. This crisis is experienced in both our everyday lived experiences and in our interactions with the formal health and care systems. Due to factors such as inequality, isolation, ecological breakdown, and a society increasingly demarcated by winners and losers, we feel ourselves to be in a careless world. Our sense of community and solidarity has become eroded. At the same time, the capacity of the care system to respond to these growing needs has become more and more limited due to various resource deficits. Behind these difficulties lies the causal impact of neoliberal economics and ideology. How then might we revive our commons of care? How to access better care?