The Fifth Wave

Connecting the futures of care.

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

Our vision

Around the world, across just one generation, many women no longer tolerate bearing the same one-sided domestic burdens as their mothers. Many men now actively seek to integrate fatherhood in their professional and personal trajectories.

The Covid-19 crisis laid bare how vital paid and unpaid care work is to the functioning of our societies, yet how little we value it. The pandemic also made starker than ever the exhausted state of our health and social care systems.

Finally, worldwide socio-demographic shifts are prompting institutions to consider new, creative ways to better support families and caregivers, foster intergenerational exchange, and build spaces more conducive to community life.

The Fifth Wave seeks to accompany this ‘care transition’ everywhere by equipping civil society actors, researchers and policymakers with the knowledge, network and resources they need to effect tangible change.

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 aims to be a global platform connecting the different threads of the care transition to envision ambitious and holistic solutions for a more caring future.

Our mission

Research

• Produce research spanning all sectors of formal and informal caregiving: early childhood and parenting, eldercare, family and community dynamics, and health and social care.

• Publish analyses of innovations around the world and interviews with academics, practitioners and organisers reshaping the futures of care.

• Provide a comprehensive year-on-year picture of how caregiving is evolving globally with our flagship annual publication, The State of Care Report. Look out for the first report in 2026.

• Sponsor PhD and post-doctoral research into care, and launch the world’s first master’s degree in integrated care studies.

Education and advocacy

• Put care stories front and center with books, collections of essays and children’s literature highlighting the complexity and the beauty of care, through our publishing arm, Fifth Wave Press.

• Support initiatives transforming care in local communities; facilitate training modules for care-friendly organisational cultures; and create tangible spaces for actors of the care transition to connect and collaborate.

Team

For now, it’s just me - Mélina Magdelénat. I am a graduate from the University of Oxford, taking a break from academia to build The Fifth Wave before embarking on a doctoral journey. My research interests lie at the intersection of masculinity and affective education - I’m fascinated by 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 will soon be onboarding analysts from around the world to provide a wide variety of perspectives on care and reach a broad diversity of actors in the space. If you’d like to work with us, don’t hesitate to get in touch!

Why ‘The Fifth Wave’?

Our name is a reminder that the futures of care stand on the shoulders of feminist giants. Care feminism depends on and intersects with the tireless work of global, intersectional feminist fights against rape culture, the continuum of male violence, workplace discrimination, lack of female political representation, homophobia, transphobia, racism, and more.

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 in any way, please email Mélina Magdelénat at melina@fifthwaveinstitute.com or message us here on Substack.

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