Jocelyn Olcott

Statement

LASA has played a critical role in my intellectual development since I was a graduate student. The LASA congress was among the very first academic conferences that I attended, and I was hooked right away by the energy, the interdisciplinarity, and — as my fellow Latin Americanist Elisabeth Jay Friedman put it — the opportunity to dance with my bibliography at the gran baile. Since then, I have served twice on the program committee and twice on book prize committees, each time enjoying the opportunity to work with a new set of colleagues I might otherwise never have met. In part because of LASA’s influence, my own work has become increasingly interdisciplinary over the course of my career, as I’ve moved more into the realm of gender and feminist studies and, more recently, care studies. 

Throughout my career, I’ve benefitted immensely from the opportunity to work with colleagues from Latin America. In 2001, the year after I completed my PhD, a group of us convened to discuss why the history of women and gender in Mexico had not generated the kind of robust and coherent historiography that had developed in the Southern Cone. That conference produced two edited volumes and launched an international network that has alternated meeting in the US and Mexico every few years ever since. I had the honor of delivering a keynote address at the last convening — in March 2020! — and remain blown away by the exciting new research being done by young scholars in this field both within and outside Mexico.

In 2018, I launched what has become Revaluing Care in the Global Economy, an international, interdisciplinary network of scholars centered on the political economy of care. The network includes a strong representation of Latin American scholars, and we’ve particularly benefitted from the work of the Red de Investigación de Trabajo del Hogar en América Latina (RITHAL), which is also quite active in LASA. The field of Care Studies is deeply interdisciplinary, drawing from other interdisciplines such as Black, indigenous, and Latinx studies as well as from disciplinary subfields such as feminist ethics and feminist economics. Generations of feminist intellectuals have investigated the question of how to ascribe value to the vast amounts of time, labor, attention, and expertise required to sustain societies, cultures, and ecologies. Particularly in contexts with strong liberal traditions, solutions have centered on policy- and market-based approaches — often leavened by magical thinking about the promise of technology to alleviate these burdens — but rarely address the underlying factors that enforce this labor system, including its pronounced maldistribution toward poor women from racially and ethnically marginalized communities. Given the robust scholarship at the intersection of Latin American Studies and Care Studies, I would be eager to search for ways to strengthen similar intellectual connections. The Association’s future likely depends upon identifying and strengthening extra-regional connections and networks.