Decolonising work-family: why should we and why now?

At a moment of intensifying global inequality, political violence, land dispossession, and intersecting systems of racism, heteropatriarchy, and capitalist extraction, we ask a pressing question: What would it mean to reimagine the work–family field decolonially, and why must we do so now? We argue that work–family scholarship remains shaped by enduring legacies of colonialism and coloniality, evident in its dominant theories, sites of knowledge production, and normative assumptions about work, care, and family life. Making the field more inclusive requires more than expanding empirical settings; it demands confronting power and unsettling the conceptual foundations of the field itself. We call on scholars to explicitly engage with power: interrogate racialised care economies, foreground silenced and marginalised voices as sites of knowledge and agency, and attend to the relational and infrastructural conditions through which work and family are co-constituted. We outline a decolonial agenda that orients the work–family field toward plural ways of thinking, theorising and doing.