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There has been increasing interest in understanding care responsibilities in developing countries but there remains limited evidence on determinants of gendered participation in care. This thesis proposes social norms as an explanation for gender- and age-based differences in the time devoted to unpaid care work - including caring for people and domestic work. It investigates how social norms exert influence at different levels, why they are complied with and how they are contested and changing. The research setting is northern Uganda, where researchers have observed socio-cultural changes resulting from a civil war, the rise of formal education, the increasing involvement of development agencies and new cultural and technological influences. I collected mixed-methods data from adults and children in this region between 2014 and 2019. Building on theories of social norms, gender and childhood, this thesis argues that social norms dictate that females are supposed to do more unpaid care work than males, and boys more than men. I focus on three factors that shape whether individuals comply with, or deviate from, prevailing care-related norms. Individuals are more likely to deviate from these norms if (1) they are able to choose to deviate (agency); (2) they are aware of alternative options (awareness); and (3) if deviating is beneficial for them (advantage). Some factors are reinforcing care-related norms in northern Uganda. However, shifts in agency, awareness and advantage suggest there is scope for change. It appears that care-related norms are changing subtly rather than radically. Whether these norms and the division of unpaid care work transform more fundamentally in the future will depend on the development of the region and remains to be explored in further research.

This dissertation starts from an empirical observation and an intellectual assumption. The former dates from 2013: during a research trip in Burkina Faso I heard and observed humanitarian workers distinguish (in both discourse and practice) between who they thought were 'real refugees' and those who were not, regardless of their legal status. The intellectual assumption is that a category and a label are not only imposed on people designated as such, but are negotiated by the actors themselves and within their interactions with other actors and their social and political economies. Building on these elements, the questions at the centre of this work are: how are hierarchies of refugeeness (re-)produced? And how, when, and why can this (re-) production create or reinforce inequalities among the refugees? I answer these questions by relying on three empirical chapters which focus on different aspects of the construction of refugeeness and the experiences people have and make of 'the refugee' category in the context of Malian forced migration in urban Burkina Faso. More specifically, I look at the encounter of the refugee regime and the refugees' lives through the study of the reproduction, negotiation, and representation of 'the refugee' status and category. What I found and show is how hierarchies of refugeeness can create or reinforce inequalities among the refugees, and how refugeeness, and the possibilities to negotiate with it are unequally produced and distributed, locally but also globally. By unpacking refugeeness through the notion of commodification and relying on ethnographic methods and economic anthropology to study humanitarian interventions, I analyse how the encounter between the refugee regime and the refugees' complex, situated, and varied lives can produce inequalities and is experienced unequally by the refugees themselves.