This project will investigate how knowledge production takes place within the context of an international organization (IO) – the International Labour Organization (ILO). Specifically, it will look into how what we know about domestic work has developed in the context of the establishment of the ILO’s Convention on Domestic Work (C189). The latter is a landmark global treaty that seeks to set employment standards and norms, for domestic workers. To date, C189 has only been ratified by 36 countries. The low ratification rate belies the demand for domestic work worldwide. This demand is an indicator of what scholars have called a global ‘care deficit’ and ‘crisis of social reproduction’. This demand will not only increase in volume (absolute numbers) but also scope (number of national territories) as the global population continues to age and as long as states do not adequately invest in social reproduction – activities that reproduce and maintain people. The ILO’s tripartite architecture makes it possible for a variety of actors to converge – origin and destination country governments, international trade unions, employer and industry associations, academics, and other entities in the UN system. A combination of human rights, women's rights and labour rights movements and efforts at the local and transnational levels instantiate C189 as an example of the emergence of a 'global agenda' in which various social forces mobilized knowledge claims to influence an outcome.
This project therefore investigates how various actors engage with an international organization in making knowledge claims about domestic work. It will seek to primarily illustrate the contingency of these claims, to show that the process by which knowledge about domestic work is created is highly contentious - as actors compete over definition of terms, scope, jurisdiction, etc. By investigating how ‘science’, or the authoritative production of knowledge claims, informs politics and vice versa. More broadly, this project draws from the sociality of knowledge production in feminist interventions in science and technology studies that attend to different sources of epistemic authority, including voices ‘from below’.
The project has four major objectives:
1. Investigate the discourses which justified the need for standard-setting treaty (C189) and reasons given for or against ratification
2. Investigate the calls for action and activities related to the ratification or rejection of C189
3. Identify what instruments, tools and data techniques the ILO created to understand the phenomenon of domestic work at a large scale
4. Examine how know-how diffuses to and from the ILO and regional actors (notably in the European Union)
