2025 WG Hart Workshop Probes the Regulation of the Movement of Care

The Institute for Advanced Legal Studies hosted another successful WG Hart legal workshop on 11th and 12th June 2025, directed by Adrienne Yong (City St. George’s, University of London), Priyasha Saksena (University of Leeds), Marie-Andrée Jacob (University of Leeds), Amanda Spalding (University of Leeds), and Amrita Limbu (University of Leeds). This year, the theme of the workshop was “Regulating the Global Movement of Care”. The workshop’s focus was creating a space to explore the legal regulation of the movement of care through the lens of a variety of disciplines: history, anthropology, politics, sociology, criminology, and creative arts, and was organised around four themes - precarity, advocacy, protection, and kinship networks - thus reflecting the diverse dimensions through which law’s role in regulating the movement of care can be examined. 

The workshop featured two keynotes, a creative arts plenary, and 12 speakers over five panels. The keynotes were delivered by Eram Alam (Harvard University), who spoke about the history of South Asian physicians in the United States, and Majella Kilkey (University of Sheffield), who discussed the difficulties of migrant care workers in maintaining relationships with their families and kinship networks. The creative arts plenary brought together Analiza Guevarra (Migrante UK) and Helen Rios (Migrante UK) to discuss the lived experiences of migrant domestic workers as well as their work with Ella Parry-Davies (King’s College London) in developing a series of soundwalks that have been used as creative and teaching resources. Other panellists spoke about care from a range of perspectives and in a variety of geographical contexts: the challenges faced by refugee nurses in the UK; the regulation of healthcare assistants in Italy; the experiences of Indonesian migrant domestic workers; the movement of care providers and abortion seekers in the United States; the organisation of migrant care workers through cooperatives and unions; the emotional regulation of care relationships; the necessity for legal reform to ensure migrant care workers’ right to family; and the experiences of au pairs in France – to name a few. The discussion was lively and expansive and the breadth of subjects demonstrates the intense topicality of the regulation of the global movement of care. 

The W G Hart Legal Workshop 2025 received generous financial support from the IALS, the Society of Legal Scholars, and the Social and Legal Studies journal.