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Paper short abstract:

In the Cape Verdean context where institutional social support has never been sufficient to guarantee daily survival, the paper examines the different contested moralities underlying local and transnational forms of care.

Paper long abstract:

In the Cape Verdean context where institutional social support has never been sufficient to guarantee daily survival, the paper examines how Cape Verdean care relations are expressed and experienced through the idioms of kinship, gender and class and analyzes the tensions in the moralities of informal, neighbourhood and intergenerational care systems.

What does it mean to be a "good" neighbour or a "good" mother, father, daughter or son? Who deserves to be cared for and who is responsible for providing care? How do these ideas relate with wealth differentiation, the ability to reciprocate and cultural representations of idealized lifestyles? How do different caring opportunities and forced caring practices transform or reproduce differences between kin and non-kin relations, classes, and genders?

Based on fieldwork carried out in Cape Verde (Santiago Island) and amidst Cape Verdean students in northern Portugal, the paper will endeavour to address these questions through an examination of the diverse ways in which individuals manage the moral, emotional and economic expectations and frustrations of different forms of care in their experiences of migration and (im)mobility. By including, in its analysis, the care given between people who are physically in different places, the paper also elucidates the role played by mobility imaginings in the inter-subjective, emotional entanglements between experiences of mobility and immobility.