2025/01/01 by Juanita Elias · 1 voice
Health Professions · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Behavioral and Psychological Studies #Education Discipline and Inequality #School Health and Nursing Education
paper · doi:10.1093/sp/jxaf048
openalex publication_date 2025/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/12/17 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Depletion: The Human Cost of Caring (Oxford University Press, 2024) is a book that I’ve followed closely, from its origin in a 2014 journal publication (Rai, Hoskyns, and Thomas 2014) to its development through various projects, workshops, and publications. Reading this book feels deeply familiar, as many of the ideas Shirin Rai explores have informed our conversations over the years. Rai’s work on depletion has been pivotal to our collaborations on care, caring, and carers in the United Kingdom, as well as our shared feminist political economy theorization of the everyday (Elias and Rai 2019; Elias et al. 2016). Over this time, I have seen depletion evolve into a tangible and far-reaching concept that enables an identification of the harms—the gendered harms—caused by the unequal distribution of social reproduction. The term “depletion,” initially borrowed from environmental accounting, is so apt because it recognizes the extractive nature of care labor: like the natural environment, care constitutes an “unvalued” resource “extracted, accumulated, and mobilized in the service of national capitalist development” (p. 5) with harmful consequences. Moreover, recognizing how care is both extractive and depleting drives us to disentangle understandings of care from its all-encompassing ideological baggage, disrupting the ideological framing of care as an act of altruism, love, or heroic resilience in the face of adversity. For me, the three chapters (3, 4, and 5) on everyday lives in New Delhi and child carers showcase the concept’s breadth and depth while also illustrating how depletion is best grasped via a research focus on the intricacies of daily lives. Thus, in her analysis of household labor among women in New Delhi, Rai highlights the moments of stress and exhaustion experienced by her participants and we are continually reminded that these experiences are so invisible and so easily naturalized (as one respondent tellingly remarked: “Make a hobby out of housework because you have to do it anyway,” p. 99). Drudgeries of daily life are, nonetheless, analyzed alongside a focus on respondents’ voice and agency with an emphasis on how respondents, as she puts it, “negotiate life” (p. 105). Moving her analysis away from New Delhi and toward the United Kingdom, the chapter on child carers (chapter 5) employs depletion to explore the injustice of childhoods lost to caregiving. At the same time, Rai points to efforts to actively change and support young lives—looking in particular at the role of the child carers charity that has articulated broad and transformative notions of care enabling a wider recognition of the costs of caring. The chapter also briefly touches on schools as sites of depletion, a discussion reflecting on the challenges posed by rigid timetables and strict attendance requirements that child carers struggle to meet. These lessons extend not only to schools but also to universities, which also need to work to better accommodate students’ caregiving responsibilities. The book thus provides a thorough account of how depletion as a concept might be mobilized in relation to concrete cases. As Rai notes, there is more than one way to engage the concept of depletion since “concepts acquire a life of their own” (p. 31). I want, therefore, to pose some ideas and questions that reflect on the challenge of “where to now?” for depletion as a concept. One area for further exploration is to consider how depletion intersects with ecological crises. As Rai argues “[e]cological crises are eroding life and livelihoods in different ways, and the poorest, most marginalized, and most vulnerable people are experiencing the depletion of their individual and collective lives in impacts from the climate crisis” (p. 34). But we also need to be attentive to how efforts to mitigate climate change can themselves reproduce forms of depletion through social reproduction. Visions of climate justice must not lose sight of questions about who in this greener economy is doing the work of care, and with what consequences? Without centering care and its costs, green transitions or other efforts to mitigate climate change risk reproducing the same injustices inherent in our current economic systems (Cohn and Duncanson 2023; Morrissey et al. 2022). The book also raises important questions about the limits of depletion as a framework. Fernandez and Athukorala (2023), for instance, describe the experiences of Ethiopian refugees in Kenya, where everyday violence is so pervasive that it becomes “ambient” and depletion tips into an attack on social reproduction. They argue, “We use the term attack intentionally because although the term ‘depletion’ of social reproduction is relevant, we argue it is insufficient to capture the intensity of the impact of violence on refugee social reproduction.” This prompts a critical reflection: where does depletion end and outright violence begin? And how might feminist scholars address this distinction? That said, Rai’s work certainly compels us to confront these challenges. It equips us with a powerful lens to name and make visible the hidden harms of unrecognized care work. By doing so, Depletion: The Human Cost of Caring offers a vital contribution to the growing canon of feminist political economy. None declared. Conflict of interest. None declared.