Care in the Time of Automation: Examining the Future of Feminized Domestic Labor

Author: Sakthi Jagannath

Field of Study: Political Science: Global and International Affairs

Program Affiliation: Source Project Research Program

Faculty Mentors: Will Glovinsky

Easel: 101

Timeslot: Afternoon

Abstract: This project engages feminist political economy to analyze how artificial intelligence and emerging technologies are reshaping feminized care labor—emotional labor, domestic work, and caregiving. Care presents a persistent paradox: it is socially indispensable and difficult to automate, yet remains systematically low-paid and low-status. While automation scholarship emphasizes efficiency and job displacement, and universal basic income (UBI) debates foreground redistribution, neither fully explains how care's value may be transformed at their intersection. The project draws on an interdisciplinary archive including feminist theories of social reproduction and emotional labor, empirical studies of care robotics and patient experience, and analyses of UBI pilots and policy frameworks. By linking these literatures, it examines how technological infrastructures and income guarantees and reorganizes both the practice and perception of care. It argues that the convergence of AI and UBI is likely to produce a stratified care economy—one that formally acknowledges care as necessary work while deepening existing inequalities.