Care For Sale

In homes and brothels around the world, migrant women are selling a unique commodity: care. Care for Sale is an in-depth ethnography of a group of middle-class women from Latin America who exchange care and intimacy for money while working as domestic and sex workers in London. Illuminating the complexities of care work, the book offers a detailed study of women's lives and working conditions. It considers how their experience of migration and intimate labor is one of rupture that both enables and forces them to gradually reconstitute themselves, in their host cities, as people quite distinct from their normal selves back home. Care for Sale illustrates the connections and the factors that contribute to migrant women choosing either domestic or sex work, including their concerns about money and morality. It moves away from a narrow focus on migration and labor to focus instead on the creation and (re)creation of persons; and on the ways in which people fashion themselves and cultivate difference, inequality, or commonality as part of their self-making projects. By doing this, the book shows migrants not only as economic actors, but also as individuals involved in an intimate process that constantly modifies their sense of morality and personhood. Care for Sale is a volume in the series ISSUES OF GLOBALIZATION: CASE STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY ANTHROPOLOGY, which examines the experiences of individual communities in our contemporary world. Each volume offers a brief and engaging exploration of a particular issue arising from globalization and its cultural, political, and economic effects on certain peoples or groups.

How free-market fundamentalists have shifted the focus of higher education to competition, metrics, consumer demand, and return on investment, and why we should change this. A new philosophy of higher education has taken hold in institutions around the world. Its supporters disavow the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and argue that the only knowledge worth pursuing is that with more or less immediate market value. Every other kind of learning is downgraded, its budget cut. In Knowledge for Sale, Lawrence Busch challenges this market-driven approach. The rationale for the current thinking, Busch explains, comes from neoliberal economics, which calls for reorganizing society around the needs of the market. The market-influenced changes to higher education include shifting the cost of education from the state to the individual, turning education from a public good to a private good subject to consumer demand; redefining higher education as a search for the highest-paying job; and turning scholarly research into a competition based on metrics including number of citations and value of grants. Students, administrators, and scholars have begun to think of themselves as economic actors rather than seekers of knowledge. Arguing for active resistance to this takeover, Busch urges us to burst the neoliberal bubble, to imagine a future not dictated by the market, a future in which there is a more educated citizenry and in which the old dichotomies—market and state, nature and culture, and equality and liberty—break down. In this future, universities value learning and not training, scholarship grapples with society's most pressing problems rather than quick fixes for corporate interests, and democracy is enriched by its educated and engaged citizens.