Introducing The Fifth Wave Institute

Making care a priority

“There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.” - Octavia E. Butler

The Fifth Wave Institute 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.

Founded in September of 2025, The Fifth Wave Institute for the Study of Care 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. Our goal is to make care a priority.

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 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, across five research axes: Parenting and childhood; Health and social care; Elder and disability care; Reproductive justice; Ethics of care. The latter, cross-cutting axis draws on the growing body of philosophical and sociological work around the ethics of care, which places interdependence and vulnerability back at the core of our value systems — and without which any discussion of care remains incomplete.

• 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.

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 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 as soon as we can.

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

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 Institute is currently forming its first team of writers to provide a wide variety of perspectives on care and reach a broad diversity of actors in the space. 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 in any way, please email Mélina Magdelénat at melina@fifthwaveinstitute.com or message us here on Substack.

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