The theme of the 2025 Transforming Care Conference is ‘Social and Human Rights in Care’. While social rights are understood as collective recognitions of human need, human rights are seen as fundamental rights to which every human being is inherently entitled and which are defined in international human rights treaties. In recent decades, there has been increasing discussion about the importance of the human rights approach and the role of social rights in the contexts of childcare, disability, and long-term care.
The 2006 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities was a breakthrough in this regard, laying the foundation for the development of human rights-based disability policies world-wide, and bringing a new approach that sees persons with disabilities as full and equal members of society with specific rights to have their needs met.
Similar discussions have taken place in the field of childcare where a range of international human rights documents recognize the importance of childcare for both parents and children, such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Also, in care for older people, international efforts to create a specific human rights treaty for older people have intensified. In 2017, the EU launched the European Pillar of Social Rights, which states that everyone has the right to affordable long-term care services of good quality. This was followed in 2022 by the European Care Strategy, which aims to ensure quality, affordable and accessible care services across the European Union, not only in long-term care but also in childcare.
Overall, social and human rights have become a key perspective in the global debate on the future of care, which is why the 2025 Transforming Care Conference hopes to bring social and human rights discussions into our research debates and strengthen their role in our research work.
The need for scientific and theoretical investigation of care and care work is highly topical and calls for further opportunities to develop mutual exchanges and confrontation among researchers. In response, the Transforming Care Conference is held every two years and is aimed at investigating how transformations of care for children, frail older people and adults with disability are playing out in policy and in practice. The conference is a meeting point for care researchers in social sciences, who are studying care issues from many different perspectives and geographical regions. We encourage contributions from around the world that investigate transformations of care in policy and in practice, either as single country or as international, global trends. In addition, we welcome single policy contributions as well as contributions that go across the policy fields of early childhood education and care, care for adults with disabilities and long-term care for frail older people in the same broad perspective. The Transforming Care Conference 2025 is held in Helsinki.