Valuing Caregivers in Vietnam: A Comparative Law and Society Exploration of Methods for Supporting Vietnam’s Informal Care Sector

The need for care is universal. Its informal provision underpins resilient societies but produces and perpetuates deep, gendered social inequalities. Potentially path-breaking ideas seek to make care sustainable and equitable: economists call for “caring economies” (Himmelweit 2013); jurisprudents use “vulnerability theory" (Busby & James 2020) to critically assess ideas behind the regulation of relationships between informal care and paid work. Yet such innovative theorising lacks attention to the agency of caregivers and the political and socio-cultural norms that bear powerfully in different political and cultural settings. This project privileges caregivers’ experiences while probing not just formal regulations but the politics and socio-cultural norms which shape and are shaped by informal care practices.

Principal Investigator: Dr Holly Snape, University of Glasgow