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In this article, we engage with recent calls to research parliaments as gendered workplaces, which build on earlier international discursive turn and institutional reform initiatives towards gender-sensitive parliaments. Our engagement explores this workplace framing and how well it translates across pluralised, global parliamentary paradigms. We develop our arguments with a special focus on the Indian parliament as a gendered institution. Viewing the parliament as a gendered workplace through an intersectional lens, we show how gender dynamics and institutional configurations of power are embedded in class, race, and caste inequalities but can shift over time through reflexive challenges. We organise our discussion through two approaches to studying parliaments as workplaces--vernacular and professional--to argue that paying attention to these approaches critically can contribute to sensitising the workplace debate to a more capacious, theoretically nuanced reading of parliaments as more gender-sensitive, gender-inclusive, and gender-responsive representative institutions. In outlining the case for paying attention to the vernacular critically, we ask whether such an understanding can help to effectively bridge local and global understandings of parliaments as workplaces and institutionalise them. In studying professionalisation, we examine the paradox that professionalisation could lead to the depoliticisation of parliaments, which might affect the nature of gender-sensitivity that is being institutionalised. This analysis thus brings together institutional, postcolonial, and intersectional strands of work to think anew about gender-equal political practices in representative bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the concept of social reproduction and its impact on care work and gendered labor. It argues that care work, predominantly performed by women and racialized minorities, is undervalued and leads to depletion of resources. Depletion occurs when resources for social reproduction fall below a sustainable threshold, resulting in various forms of harm. The article emphasizes the importance of recognizing and measuring depletion and proposes strategies for mitigation, replenishment, and transformation. It also highlights the intersectional nature of depletion and calls for urgent attention to address this issue. The text discusses the role of the state and the law in supporting or hindering social reproduction and migration, and argues for legal interventions to address physical harm and economic loss. It emphasizes the importance of recognizing and remedying the harms of corporate malpractices and building solidarity across differences to reverse depletion. The text suggests that investment in social infrastructure, regulation of corporate malpractice, and reshaping consumption and production patterns are strategies needed to reverse depletion. [Extracted from the article]

This article presents an investigation into the racialized and gendered dynamics of the intensifying crisis in care for older people in the United Kingdom. Deploying a feminist political economy framework, we reveal how the care crisis is an intersectional crisis of social reproduction worsened by both austerity and COVID-19. We do this through an analysis of a small set of interviews with South Asian older women with care needs, conducted during the first period of UK national lockdown in 2020. This was a pilot study, focusing on the challenges faced in accessing formal and informal care during this period of the pandemic. The experiences, fears, and vulnerabilities that came through in the interviews are located within a broader analysis of the racialized care crisis—one that reveals the long-term harms that austerity, including "austerity Islamophobia," generated for these older women and their families as they struggled to provide and access un/paid care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]