The Fifth Wave Institute

Building better care.

The Fifth Wave Institute is a think-and-act-tank dedicated to building a future of fair, valued and collective caregiving.

The Fifth Wave Institute est un laboratoire d’idées et d’actions dédié à la construction de meilleurs systèmes de soin.

Our vision

The organisation of care in our societies is a broken one.

It’s disproportionately shouldered by certain groups of people. It fails to provide the adequate care all of us need to thrive. It denies that vulnerability and interdependence are essential dimensions of our shared human condition, treating them as odd glitches instead. It prioritises clinical and short-term economic outcomes over a holistic understanding of well-being. It siloes care into separated segments of our lives, rather than grounding it at the heart of community, work, and family life. It is ill-equipped to deal with the consequences of substantial ongoing demographic changes.

But this isn’t a fatality. ‘There are new suns’. Better systems exist and are being built across the world. Others are being imagined by researchers, activists, organisers, and can be made a reality. Better ideas about care exist, new ones are continuously emerging, and they can be made to reach many more minds than they currently are.

This dual reality is our ‘why’. The Institute exists because the way we structure and understand care is inadequate, and we need to envision bold and interconnected solutions to fix it.

Our mission

We’re a think-and-act tank grounded in the insights of care ethics and feminist care studies. We work to a) apply those insights to transform our understanding of care, and b) scale them into replicable policy solutions.

We all care, and are all cared for. Some more than others: care is at once one of the most universal yet most unequally distributed of human activities. The Fifth Wave Institute aims to connect the different threads of the care transition to envision ambitious and holistic solutions for a more caring future.

Our work

THINK

Publications

• Blueprints. We analyse local and national alternatives to current care systems, in order to learn from, adapt, and replicate them. When it comes to social innovation, the “local initiative —> replication —> integration into the national infrastructure” pipeline is a tried and tested way to drive society-wide change. We believe in starting small, and scaling what works.

• Interviews. We publish interviews with people building the futures of care, whether through their practice or their thinking. People who try their hardest to make up for the harshness of our systems with creativity and passion.

  And because the best insights on care come from caring, we ask all our interviewees: “Who do you care for, and who cares for you?”

• Essays. We work to shift narratives around care, showing that humans are interdependent, vulnerable, and better set up to flourish when supported by resilient care systems. We aim to elevate the importance of caregiving in all its forms, as essential public infrastructure, as a structuring principle of social life, and as a central concern of political decision-making.

Events

We curate spaces for bold thinking about care. Subscribe to our newsletter to be notified of upcoming events.

ACT

We advise organisations, local councils, health and education departments, and similar institutions to help them design, build, replicate and scale alternatives to current care systems.

Our values

As our name reveals, we are a feminist research institute, with a strong intellectual debt to the many feminist writers, activists and academics who have long enriched and questioned our ideas about care. We are committed to advancing reproductive justice, acknowledging the vital role that Black and queer feminists in particular have played — and are still playing — in that fight.

We are a global platform, aiming to bring into dialogue a variety of perspectives on care from across the world. Care is about as universal a human activity as it gets, as there is much to be learned from innovations taking place everywhere. Though we only publish in French and English at this stage, we aim to translate more of our materials into other languages once we have the resources to do so.

Care is not politically neutral — it is deeply marked by inequality of gender, race, and class. We aim to highlight this in our research, and shed light on the intersection of fairer care with environmental justice, LGBTQ+ rights, disability rights, racial justice, and more.

Team

TFWI was founded in September of 2025 by Mélina Magdelénat. A graduate from the University of Oxford, her research interests lie at the intersection of masculinity and affective education - how men learn to care, how different societies teach them to care, and how we can design better paths for young men into caregiving roles.

The Fifth Wave Institute is currently onboarding its first team of writers. If you’re a student, graduate or early career researcher and you’d like to write for us, don’t hesitate to get in touch!

Get involved

Just like caregiving itself, building the futures of care is a collective effort. We are actively seeking to partner with other organisations, collectives, and researchers working in any segment of the care sector.

If you resonate with our mission and would like to be a part of the journey, please email Mélina Magdelénat at melina@fifthwaveinstitute.com.

If you would simply like to follow along and learn about the futures of care, subscribe to our newsletter.