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Affective Equality: Love, Care and Injustice, edited by Kathleen Lynch, John Baker, and Maureen Lyons. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 289pp. $32.95 paper. ISBN: 9780230227194.
Picking up on their previous volume, Equality: from Theory to Action (2004), Kathleen Lynch, John Baker and Maureen Lyons provide a more developed theoretical framework for what they describe as affective equality.
In Affective Equality, Lynch, Baker and Lyons advance a theoretical understanding of affective inequality first by expanding their framework of analysis in the introduction, Chapters One and Two. Then, in Chapters Three-Nine, they offer the findings from four original empirical studies based on original interviews and what they call "care conversations" with a range of providers and recipients. In so doing, they seek to contribute to scholarly understanding of care work by examining care costs, choices, and identities across a range of care contexts; and seek to contribute empirical conclusions to a field that is too often dismissed as "simply private" or less central to the creation and perpetuation of inequalities.
For scholars of care work, what the authors refer to as "loving labour," these new studies gathered and summarized here will provide new considerations of who provides care and...