Jennifer Nedelsky: "Working hours need to be limited to allow unpaid care"
The holder of the 2024–2025 Carl and Thecla Lamberg Visiting Professorship, Professor Jennifer Nedelsky, is an internationally renowned and prominent scholar in law and political theory. She is well-known and frequently cited by researchers across various disciplines, including law, political science, and other related fields.
Hi Jennifer! You are the holder of the Carl and Thecla Lamberg Visiting Professorship 2024-2025 and you are here at the Department of Law during the autumn and spring.
You are a researcher in law and political theory with broad experience. Do you have any area of particular interest right now, and if so, what and why?
My new project “More than human constitutialism”, how we need to rethink our basic understandings of law, legal and political institutions when we take the more than human in to account. The earth and all of its creatures, are not just resources but fellow subjects who have their own integrity and entitlements to care, dignity and respect.
A paper on that topic is just about to be published.
That was also one of my main interests in coming here, to meet the people from the Nordics that work with sustainability issues.
Another ongoing project is about Private law and how it can it be used for progressive purposes.
In your latest book, Part Time for All: A Care Manifesto (Oxford University Press, 2023), which you co-authored with Tom Malleson, the two of you discuss what you see as the Western imbalance between work and care. You suggest that no one should work more than 30 hours a week to also have time for relationships, care and life outside of work.
In Scandinavia and Sweden, parents have more opportunities and benefits than in many other countries: longer parental leave with compensation, special days that are weighted for the individual parent to encourage more fathers to stay at home with their children, quite generous rules for staying at home to care for sick children. How do you see it? Are we on the right track, is it enough or are there any other measures you would like to suggest?
These are definitely policies that improve gender equality and the quality of family life. They have rightly been a model all over the world. But they are not enough. They improve things, but do not fundamentally change the ways the expectations of many workplaces are inconsistent with the care responsibilities most people have for family and friends. They cannot make deep changes in the ways paid work is seen as more important than unpaid care. Part of the project of Part Time for All is to change norms around both work and care so that the true value of care is recognized—and experienced by everyone. As long as only a subset of people provide most of the care, and those in positions of high-level decision-making do very little of it, we will have ignorant policy makers and care providers who continue to be denigrated.
It is very important for families to have fathers bonding with their infants and be co-carers for them. But doing this for a few months a couple times in their lives is not enough to learn the knowledge, skills, and dispositions of care. People should be involved in significant unpaid care (around 22 hours a week) throughout their lives in order to learn the humility, skills in judgment, and awareness of the centrality of care to the relationships that provide the foundation of happiness.
Work hours need to be limited to allow for this very significant change in the patters of who provides care.
Hanna Arendt was your supervisor during your doctoral studies, what is the most important thing you took away from that time?
At a personal level, it was very important to me that the person whose intellectual powers I admired most was a woman. Prior to meeting Hannah Arendt, I had never had, or even seen, a female professor. (I graduated with a degree in Psychology in 1970.) Then in my first year of graduate school I met someone I saw as brilliant, whose work I deeply admired, and who agreed to have me come to her classes at the New School (I was a doctoral student at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago where she was a faculty member, but rarely in residence.) And then she agreed to supervise my dissertation. I think intellectually it was her creativity and wide ranging and critical thinking that inspired me. It was many years before I turned to her scholarship to build on for my own work on judgment. But I think her mode of thinking influenced the relational approach I developed, and she provide an ongoing inspiration.
Jennifer Nedelsky, B.A. (Rochester) 1970, M.A. (Chicago) 1974, Ph.D. (Chicago), 1977. Prior to joining the University of Toronto, Professor Nedelsky was a Killam post-doctoral fellow at Dalhousie University (1977-79) and an Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton University (1979-1985).
She was appointed Assistant Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of Toronto in 1986 and promoted to full Professor in 1995. In 1991 and 1994, she was Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago.
Professor Nedelsky's teaching and scholarship have been concentrated on Feminist Theory, Legal Theory, American Constitutional History and Interpretation, and Comparative Constitutionalism.
Professor Nedelsky is known not only as a highly experienced, deeply inspiring and thought provoking legal scholar but also as a genuinely engaged, curious and humble academic who supports and encourages especially early career scholars. Her research has a critical and interdisciplinary approach mirroring the distinctive feature of the research and pedagogical approaches that the Department of Law in Gothenburg is well known for. In addition, Professor Nedelsky’s scholarship is characterized by a profound sustainability perspective, something which clearly adds to the sustainability goals profile of the School of Economics, Business and Law.