Preliminary Notes

Jocelyn Olcott is Professor of History and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. Her first book, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico, explores questions of gender and citizenship in the 1930s.  Her second book, International Women’s Year:  The Greatest Consciousness-Raising Event in History considers the history and legacies of the United Nation’s first world conference on women in 1975 in Mexico City (Oxford University Press, 2017). 

She is currently working on two book-length studies.  The first a centers on uses the life of the noted organic intellectual Concha Michel as a narrative frame to explore debates over gender and political economy that have roiled twentieth-century Mexico.  It follows Michel's life story from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth to examine the ways that the concept, labor, and policies surrounding “motherhood” articulated with major shifts in political-economic thought. 

Her other current book project grows out of a career-long commitment to studying the intersection between feminism and political economy in the Global South.  “Disruptors:  The Third-World Roots of Feminist Economics” follows the careers of a cohort of activist intellectuals who launched their careers during the UN Decade for Women (1976-85) and formed self-identified Third Worldist networks that pressed to reconceptualize what constituted development and, by extension, an economy.  

She directs the NEH-sponsored international, interdisciplinary project, Revaluing Care in the Global Economy.  The project started from the longstanding recognition of the maldistribution of carework and the robust body of research and critical thinking across disciplines, including extensive data collection, various metrics and indices, and reams of essays decrying the fact that — around the world — carework remains badly undervalued in all senses and falls overwhelmingly to women, particularly racially or ethnically marginalized women.  The project centers on three principal research areas:  metrics (how to measure care, how it affects care when we try to measure it); governance (how laws and policies both foster and reflect normative values of care), and social practices (how various practices and social formations inform attention to care). It considers the ways that social, cultural, and ecological care are all interdependent and imbricate and starts from the recognition that innovative solutions to the “crisis of care” can be found in many corners the world, particularly those that have been most suspicious of the standard repertoire state-, market-, and technology-based solutions