We are delighted to announce four distinguished keynote speakers.
Opening session on 28th June, 2027:
Professor Pei-Chia Lan, National Taiwan University
Global Care Circuits: Carework Migration in East Asia
The “global care chain” has been a powerful concept that captures multi-layered inequalities and emotional exploitation in carework migration. The concept is, however, criticized for assuming a linear model of transferring and extracting care labor and reinforcing geographic and ideological binaries such as the Global North/Global South. Instead, scholars have proposed concepts such as “care circulation” or “care circuits” to account for the production of multiple affections and the shifting networks of emotion in transnational families.
I use the concept “global care circuits” to further examine the multidirectional exchanges of care, emotions, and labor between different actors and across generations, sectors, and locales. The notion decenters the nuclear family and incorporates local and transnational networks of kin and fictive kin; instead of focusing on the exploitative effect of commodification, this notion explores the moral economy of carework.
This talk will also draw on the comparison of two major receiving countries in Asia to examine how global care circuits are institutionally organized differently. Taiwan has produced family-centered, flexible care circuits, in which live-in care workers are “unskilled” yet desirable. By contrast, Japan has produced institution-centered, highly governed care circuits, in which migrant caregivers are viewed as “skilled” yet culturally marginalized. The comparison of global care circuits opens up a series of possibilities for future researchers to explore how people negotiate the intertwined meanings of care, navigate the changing formation of family, and reconfigure power relations in the contexts of migration and transnationalism.
Pei-Chia Lan is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at National Taiwan University. Starting from September 2026, she will be Wang Family & Chen Family Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and also the director of the Taiwan Program at Walter Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) at Stanford University. Her major publications include Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan (Duke 2006, won a Distinguished Book Award from the Sex and Gender Section of the American Sociological Association and ICAS Book Prize: Best Study in Social Science from the International Convention of Asian Scholars) and Raising Global Families: Parenting, Immigration, and Class in Taiwan and the US (Stanford 2018).
29th June morning session:
Professor Joan Tronto, University of Minnesota
The Future is Democratic and Caring
Although throughout the world there is a tidal wave of hateful, authoritarian political activity, I will argue that the best way to counteract such hatred is to offer a response that is radically democratic. The problems the world now faces – most seriously, climate change and other ecological disasters, increasing warfare and tribalisms, worldwide oligarchic control – cry out for democratic, inclusive, and future oriented action. No radical democratic movement or institution is possible, however, without putting care at its center, hence any really humane future will need to be both caring and democratic. The paper will support this claim by exposing the underpinnings of this careless world, by proposing the caring democratic alternative, and then by surveying promising global signs that such alternatives are possible.
Joan Tronto, recipient of the American Political Science Association’s 2023 Benjamin E. Lippincott Award, is Professor Emerita of Political Science at Hunter College and the Graduate School, City University of New York, and Professor Emerita of Political Science at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She received a BA degree from Oberlin College and a MA and PhD from Princeton University. She taught at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine from 1978-1982, when she joined the faculty at Hunter College, City University of New York. Tronto moved from Hunter and the Graduate School at CUNY to the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where she taught from 2009-2019 when she retired.
Among her academic honors, Tronto served as a Fulbright Fellow in Bologna, Italy in 2007. In 2008, she and Stephen Leonard were co-recipients of the first Okin-Young Prize awarded by APSA. She received the Brown Prize for Democracy in 2015 from Penn State University. Tronto was awarded a doctorate honoris causa by the University for Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, the Netherlands in 2014, and she was awarded a doctorate, honoris causa, by the Université Catholique de Louvain (Louvain-la- Neuve, Belgium). At Hunter College, she received the first Presidential Award for Teaching Excellence in 1990. At Minnesota, she was a Scholar of the College of Liberal Arts from 2013-16.
Tronto chaired the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual Political Science Caucus of APSA during 1993-94. Among her other services to the Association, she served on the APSA Council from 1997-99 and as Vice President of the Association during 2004-05. She has served on the editorial boards of both the American Political Science Review and Perspectives on Politics. At Hunter, Tronto chaired the College Senate, at the CUNY Graduate Center she served as Acting Executive Officer, and at Minnesota, she chaired the political science department.
As a scholar, Tronto has an h factor of 40, having published widely about care ethics in her career. In addition to publishing Moral Boundaries, she has published several other volumes and more than 60 articles. Her works have been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, German, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Polish, and Portuguese.
29th June afternoon session:
Dr. Ásdís Aðalbjörg Arnalds, University of Iceland
Encouraging Shared Care: Lessons from the Icelandic Case
Nordic leave policies have sought to transform care by promoting gender equality in both paid work and caregiving. The Nordic model is often characterized by its dual-earner/dual-carer approach, where policy design aims to enable both parents to participate in the labour market while sharing responsibility for childcare.
Focusing on Iceland as a key example, the presentation examines the development and impact of a leave scheme aimed at securing children’s right to care from both parents through individual, non-transferable entitlements. Since the introduction of equal leave quotas for both parents in 2000, Iceland has been widely regarded as a success story. Most fathers take their leave, and increased uptake has translated into and more equal sharing of care in the years following childbirth. These developments have contributed to shifting norms around fatherhood and everyday family practices.
At the same time, important challenges remain. Mothers continue to assume a larger share of caregiving overall. A key issue is a care-gap between the end of parental leave and access to early childhood education and care, which often leads mothers to reduce labour market participation. In addition, cultural expectations and workplace norms continue to shape how care is distributed.
The Icelandic case thus illustrates both the potential and the limitations of policy design in transforming care. It demonstrates how well-designed leave policies can promote more equal parenthood, while also highlighting the importance of broader institutional and cultural contexts in shaping parents’ caregiving practices.
Ásdís A. Arnalds is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Social Work at the University of Iceland. She completed her PhD in 2020 and has since established herself as a leading researcher in the field of care policies and family decision-making. She has led several large-scale research projects, including a project which received the Grant of Excellence from the Icelandic Research Council on fertility intentions and behaviour in Iceland, as well as a Nordic collaborative project on parental leave and social sustainability.
Her research focuses on care policies, gender equality in caregiving, and the interplay between work and care. Combining qualitative and quantitative approaches, she examines how care policies shape family life, childbearing decisions, and parental practices. She has published extensively on parental leave, caregiving arrangements, and changing family forms, with a particular emphasis on the Nordic countries, and Iceland in particular.
Arnalds is actively engaged in international research on care regimes and participates in collaborative Nordic and European research networks addressing the future of leave policies and social sustainability.
30th June closing session:
Professor Barbara Barbosa Neves, University of Sydney
Automating Ageism: AI, Carefication, and Ageing Futures
From courtrooms to care homes, artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping what it means to grow old. On one hand, AI-driven hiring platforms are facing lawsuits for discriminating against older applicants, sometimes as young as 40. On the other, media headlines celebrate robots as solutions to the ‘aged care crisis’, alongside multimillion-dollar investments in chatbots that promise to cure loneliness among older people. These examples reflect how ageing and care are increasingly framed as problems to be fixed through technology.
This keynote draws on my body of work examining how ageing and care are imagined, designed, and governed through AI. It brings together quantitative and qualitative research with care providers, recipients, advocates, and AI developers; ‘futuring’ activities with older people; and analyses of AgeTech companies and AI training datasets. From this, I show how ageism, datafication, and carefication underpin contemporary visions of care, rendering later life as data and reconfiguring it through technological logics. I further advance the notion of sociotechnical ageism to demonstrate how the exclusion of older people from datasets and decision-making processes reproduces assumptions of passivity, dependence, and incompetence. These dynamics reinforce surveillance, institutionalisation, and control, instead of supporting autonomy and dignity.
Yet, tackling ageism requires more than diversifying datasets; it demands a fundamental shift in how ageing and technology are approached. Moving beyond AI hype and fear, I propose a regenerative lens for AI in care – one that recognises potential while confronting its human, social, and environmental costs. This means going from designing technologies for older people to shaping futures with them, opening pathways toward equitable and dignified caring futures, grounded in possibility rather than age-based deficit, and in socio-ecological sustainability rather than extraction.
Professor Barbara Barbosa Neves (PhD, FRSA, FHEA) is an award-winning sociologist of ageing and technology. She is an internationally recognised expert on loneliness, social isolation, and digital inequalities in later life. Her research bridges gerontology, sociology, and computer science, fields that she brings together to understand not just how technologies work, but for whom, and with what consequences.
Before moving to Australia, she was Associate Director of the Technologies for Aging Gracefully Lab in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is now Professor of Sociology, Australian Research Council Future Fellow, and Senior Horizon Fellow in AI and Ageing at the University of Sydney. She leads the AI Social Science team at the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies and is the lead investigator of a national evaluation of an aged care social program for the Australian government. Additionally, she is an Adjunct Professor of Technology & Society at the Department of Human-Centred Computing, Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University.
Her co-designed, mixed-methods research examines how emerging technologies – like AI, robotics, and virtual reality – can support rather than exclude older people. This work has informed technology design and policy across Canada, Australia, and Europe, and has been cited by the UN, OECD, WHO, and EU. She has secured more than $7 million in competitive funding and works closely with community organisations, government, and industry to develop inclusive, evidence-based initiatives that uphold dignity and rights in later life. Her contributions have been honoured with 28 awards, including being named a Fellow of the British Royal Society of Arts (2022) and one of the ABC Top 5 Scholars in Australia (2019).
She has authored over 100 publications and is committed to reaching audiences beyond academia. She has made over 200 media appearances on outlets including ABC, CBC, SBS, The Guardian, written for The Conversation, and featured in the SBS documentary What Does Australia Really Think About Old People?.