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- Convenors:
-
Carlos Chirinos
(Rovira i Virgili University)
Ana Lucia Hernández Cordero (University of Zaragoza)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Main Site Tower (MST), 01/003
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The pandemic has impacted daily care of the elderly, disrupting common spaces and the participation of other social agents. This panel seeks to reflect on how the pandemic has affected the care of older adults in spaces of proximity and belonging.
Long Abstract:
Social care, particularly of the elderly, has little influence in political and cultural spheres (Daly, 2020). The pandemic has merely made this structural problem visible, and aggravated the care crisis. In many societies, the care of the elderly still lies with families, especially women, around whom there is a whole range of resources and care agents such as day centres, home care services, and foreign women workers. This "mosaic of care" (Soronellas and Comas-d'Argemir, 2017), constructed on the basis of the family, means that this practice is understood as a collective, proximate effort in terms of space and belonging. The onset of the pandemic has disrupted this sense of daily care of the elderly in a common space. The pandemic has altered care strategies in the personal environment, and redefined participation and spaces.
The daily care of older people involves various family-related agents and spaces organised from a sense of belonging and what they have in common. This panel addresses the question: How has the pandemic transformed these practices and imaginaries of daily care of the elderly provided from this immediate environment? Contributions may address: 1) spaces and trajectories of care for the elderly, 2) the participation of social agents in care, 3) gender, kinship and intergenerational relationships in care for the elderly, 4) the institutionalization of daily care (from home to nursing homes), 5) various experiences of care and ageing (corporality, LGTBI+, migrations, etc.).
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 July, 2022, -Sona Gyarfas Lutherova (Slovak Academy of Sciences) Lubica Volanska (Slovak Academy of Sciences)
Paper short abstract:
During the Covid-19 pandemic in Slovakia, seniors were constructed as the most vulnerable social group. The overly unified and simplified image positioned them in between the contradictory tendencies: patronizing control on one hand and indifference to their needs and perspectives on the other.
Paper long abstract:
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the position of seniors as one of the most vulnerable social groups has remained in the foreground in media and public discourse in Slovakia. Their vulnerability was constructed in the context of the illness itself, but also regarding the impact of the pandemic on their mental health (Tyrrell et al., 2020). Their public image has been overly simplified, related to the necessity of “taking care” of them. The pandemic living conditions, connected to the perception of threat and the internal and external pressure for social isolation significantly changed the patterns of their everyday lives, but often incongruently with the unified public image.
The research is built on data obtained from online questionnaire surveys (March 2020, April 2021 with around 3000 questionnaires) and continuous qualitative research (ethnographic interviews + diaries). We reflect on how ideas of age and generational differences have been utilized to position different social groups in opposition (Cohn-Schwartz & Ayalon 2020). Under specific circumstances, the youth was constructed as careless and a threat, childhood and older age as the preconditions to be cared for and protected, and the intergenerational care as a one-directional burdensome activity. Simultaneously, the crisis of responsibility occurred: the state abdicated from the duties of the care for the dependable society members, but excessively interfered with and patronized the “vulnerable”. These contradictory tendencies left the seniors in a precarious position: being left on their own and dependable on informal ties, and thus not being allowed to make autonomous decisions.
Maria Offenhenden (Rovira i Virgili University) Yolanda Bodoque-Puerta (Universitat Rovira i Virgili) Montserrat Soronellas Masdeu (Rovira i Virgili University)
Paper short abstract:
In Spain, the outbreak of the pandemic has reinforced the home as a space for care, conditioning the re-familiarisation of long-term care. We explore the possibility of generating a new care model that displaces the role of the family and women in the management and provision of care work.
Paper long abstract:
In Spain, due to the weakness of public policies, care of the elderly primarily takes place within the framework of a markedly family-oriented welfare system. This means that families, and especially women, build complex mosaics of care resources in which, in addition to family members, the market, the state, and the community daily articulate in the provision of care services. The outbreak of the pandemic has reinforced the home as a space for care, conditioning and modifying the strategies of families in care provision.
Using ethnographic data collected in an ongoing research study, in this paper we will analyse how the mosaic of care resources has changed as a result of the COVID pandemic. Specifically, we are interested in exploring: 1) the re-familiarisation of care work; 2) how families articulate with other care agents in the pandemic context; and finally, 3) the impact on families of reorienting public policy towards a more deinstitutionalised system that privileges the home as a space for care. Analysing the balance between the role of the families and the role of public policies in catering long-term care needs will allow us to shed light on the limits of the current model of care provision and, in doing so, also put forward alternative formulas that may promote the social redistribution of care, displacing the central role of the family and women in the daily management and provision of care for the elderly.
Anna Žabicka (University of Vienna, Riga Stradiņš University)
Paper short abstract:
For older residents in a rural Latvian nursing home, the Covid-19 restrictions became a medium to channel one’s feelings of changed kin relations and un-belonging preexisting the pandemic, partially related to out-migration after the 2008-2009 economic crisis.
Paper long abstract:
In fall 2020, under strict Covid-19 quarantine, a 93-year-old woman Lidija living in a Latvian rural nursing home repeatedly told me that the Latvian government invented the SARS-CoV-2 virus to repatriate emigrated Latvian citizens back to Latvia and thus, assumingly, “fix” broken kin relations including family care for older adults. When asked whether, in her opinion, the virus is real, she always confirmed it is. She was also well informed about the dangers that SARS-CoV-2 brings. Far from being the only one, Lidija, however, made the most distinguished connection between the Covid-19 pandemic, the aftermath of the out-migration after the economic crisis in 2008-2009, her current sense of isolation, and ideas of who should care for whom including the state.
In this paper, I engage with Lidija’s and other residents’ experiences of Covid-19 related quarantine at the rural Latvian nursing home by looking in-depth how these people – deemed by the government as the most vulnerable ones – dealt with Covid-19 related risks. First, I touch upon how the Covid-19 pandemic further challenged the relationship between care and social connectedness. Second, I show that the Covid-19 pandemic served as an exacerbation of other unresolved issues concerning imagined kin relations and the state’s role in re-creating them. Third, I argue that the nursing home residents used the pandemic as a medium to channel and explain their frustrations like isolation, loneliness, and un-belonging that existed before the pandemic and included larger socio-economic issues and ideas of morally right kin.
Julia Chrétien Kindelberger (Universitat Rovira i Virgili)
Paper short abstract:
I propose to discuss the crucial importance of heterosexuality, understood as a political regime (Wittig, 1992), to address the social organization of care for elderly, drawn from experiences and practices of lesbians in Barcelona.
Paper long abstract:
I propose to discuss the crucial importance of heterosexuality, understood as a political regime (Wittig, 1992), to address the social organization of care for elderly, drawn from my ongoing ethnographic investigation for my PhD thesis in Barcelona. The objective will be to show how approaching care from experiences and practices of lesbians allows us to highlight not only the patriarchal but also the heteronormative organization of elderly care in Spain, and how the pandemic has stressed out and somehow accentuated some of its manifestations.
Care work can be considered as a paradigmatic illustration of social, sexual, racial and international division of labour (Davis, 1981; Nakano Glenn, 1992; Galerand and Kergoat, 2008). In Spain, the social organization of care, especially for elderly, is strongly family-based, meaning that for one-hand, families, and concretely women, assume an actual important care work, and on the other-hand, weave and organise the “mosaic of care” (Soronellas and Comas-d'Argemir, 2017) and mobilise the different actors needed. If gender is a key to understanding women’s assignment to care tasks, as well as class, race and nationality, I want to discuss the impact of heterosexuality in this division, as a political regime that both allows to understand the weight of family, as an institution, in the social care organization, but also the specific care responsibility faced by adult lesbians within families for living outside the hegemonic model.