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- Convenors:
-
Angelina Kussy
(Autonomous University of Barcelona)
Petra Ezzeddine (Charles University, Prague)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Lanyon Building (LAN), 01/002 CR & CC
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel explores the existing landscapes of care and emerging responses of the states, municipalities and civil society to the care crisis. We explore mobilities shaping care practices, welfare policies and place-based initiatives based on the commons.
Long Abstract:
The absence of a coherent political strategy to address the care crisis is an urgent problem. While capitalist markets take advantage of the care crisis through a "care fix" driven by the commodification of care provision (Dowling 2020), state inaction in this realm aggravates social inequalities and injustice (Comas-d'Argemir 2020).
This panel aims to explore the existing landscapes of care provision, needs and imaginaries, as well as emerging responses of the states, municipalities, cooperative movement or care migrants initiatives to the care crisis and the impact of the welfare policies on the social organisation of care, carers and people with dependencies.
We also want to pay attention to different modes of relocation of care in order to understand how care is shaped by economic inequalities in the region, overlapping histories and requiring to question centre/periphery relations, welfare policies and other sectors of society (Krause, Sapieha & Schurian 2019).
We welcome ethnographies and anthropological analyses based on decolonial perspectives and the political economy of care (Ezzeddine & Uhde 2020) in the European context:
a) overlapping mobilities shaping landscapes of care needs, practices and imaginaries
b) welfare responses to the care crisis
c) place-based initiatives of progressive municipalities or bottom-up movements based on the commons, to discuss their potential and limits in "prefiguring" alternatives (Kussy et al. 2023) and envisioning a more communitarian care model, less focused on the states, market and family (Vega et al. 2019).
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
The paper presents a case study of a senior centre in Bratislava and its closure that triggered an unprecedented reaction by the clients and the community concerned. The bottom-up perspective is used to understand the impact of the wider public setting and public policies on the regimes of care.
Paper long abstract:
The paper presents a case study of a senior centre/day-care centre in Bratislava as a subject of political debate on the communal level in the City Administrative District of Bratislava-Stare Mesto/Old Town. The decision to replace the senior centre with a créche pitted two age groups against each other, which made the public discussion about the persistence of the senior centre or its abolition extremely complicated.
However, the decision triggered a reaction that was unprecedented for Slovakia initiated by the centre´s senior clients themselves and the community concerned – challenging the idea of seniors being passive and not interested in the res publica in the sense of ageivism as suggested by Israel Doron (2018).
The data were collected via ethnographic research: participant observation and in-depth interviews with the centre's clients, their relatives, personnel and a broader community of neighbours (2017 – 2021). They focus on how a place-based community united around the day-care centre responded to its abolition: Creating a civic association that addressed intergenerational communication and the importance of supporting the debate about it in the broader society. Nowadays, the community continues on a symbolic level (Cohen 1985).
The bottom-up perspective is used to understand the impact of the wider public setting and public policies on the regimes of care on the senior citizens in the era of its intense transformation (Dahl 2017), when the roles of the family, the state and the communities are negotiated.
Paper short abstract:
This research is about collaborative homes for the elderly as an alternative to living the old age. As first results we have that homes together with community life are the scene of care situations, not only in dependency, but in the daily extension, from an individual (self-care) and community view
Paper long abstract:
The aging process is a central topic of debate today and presents great challenges to face as a society. In a specific context of profound social changes: family roles, care provision, life expectancy, aging of society, weakened welfare state, alternatives to the current model of aging arise. In Spain, the collaborative homes for the elderly are gaining popularity under the premise of focusing on the community.
There are several projects in coexistence and new groups in formation proliferate. These groups want to make the collaborative home their way of life and living, but the difficulties in the formation process and the consequent dilation in time are some of the conditioning factors that lead to the disappearance of many of these groups.
In the current scenario, numerous questions emerge: What is self-care? How is the apparent oxymoron of self-care (individual) and community care linked? How does gender and class affect? Is the collaborative home a care promotion mechanism?
Food, sports, emotional well-being, hygiene or activist aging are some recurring elements of self-care in the discourses of older people who live in collaborative homes. In turn, the will to live in harmony with the group, without being a burden to others and being able to enjoy the benefits of the community, is another discourse that is intertwined with the previous one.
To carry out this research, a qualitative methodology has been used, applying virtual ethnography during lockdown and combining it with face-to-face fieldwork in the times that have been allowed.
Paper short abstract:
In transnational care relocation to CEE countries, seniors are moved to make use of more affordable care. Care entitlements across borders thereby become “enclosed” resources for other projects and resonate with overlapping histories, shifting boundaries and and ambiguous centre-periphery relations.
Paper long abstract:
One well researched response to the care crises in many European countries is the transnationalization of care by hiring a live-in care worker, resulting in a ‘care gap’ in the places such workers leave behind. In this paper we report on a project which looks at the reverse phenomenon: care relocation, in which German speaking seniors are relocated to places in Central Eastern Europe (CZ, SL, HU, PL) where care is more affordable due to lower labour costs. Care relocation can be seen as an emblematic example of the marketization of care and a niche phenomenon within Europe's transnational care landscape. Social citizenship entitlements thereby become "enclosed" resources within the arbitrage of economic inequalities as entitlements are carried across national borders. Most care homes are located in regions characterized by shifting borders, and contested German and Habsburg-Hungarian history, adding historical complexity to the story. Some serve only German-speaking patients, others serve local, wealthier elderly people as well. They are run by former migrant care workers and by international companies, bringing labour migration, and other not care related sectors into the picture, such as real estate investment and hospitality.
In this paper we will anlayse how this marginal and specific “fix” of the care crises does not only respond to the individual care needs of families but “encloses” entitlements stemming from social citizenship as capital for other projects, reviving overlapping histories and newly negotiated centre-periphery relations in the entangling of unequal welfare states in Europe.
Paper short abstract:
This contribution presents a theoretical approach to the analysis of the contested market and community shift in elderly care provision and discusses the socio-political embedding of live-in-care and caring communities on the empirical basis of care regime analyses in Amsterdam, Budapest, and Vienna
Paper long abstract:
The way in which elderly care is provided has become an increasingly controversial topic for contemporary societies. In this context and in response to the care crisis, a market- and community-shift can be observed. These tendencies are accompanied by changing responsibilities of the state, the market, the community and the family, as well as a transformation of the meaning of care. As part of the project “The Contested Provisioning of Care and Housing” (www.contestedcareandhousing.com) this contribution, in a first part, draws on Polanyi, to reflect the market- and community-shift in the field of elderly care as “double movements” and with regard to the hybrid interaction of “market-exchange”, “reciprocity”, and “redistribution”. Furthermore, an Institutional Logics perspective is used to show how these economic principles correspond to the institutional order of society. Foucault’s analysis of power and governmentality will be taken up in order to focus on subjectivation, power relations and technologies of government. The second part discusses the socio-political (de)regulation of the interplay between the state, market, civil society, and family based on empirical results of care-regime analyses in Amsterdam, Budapest, and Vienna. This shows how live-in-care - as an exemplary case of the marketisation of care - and caring communities - representing the community-shift - are embedded in each regime. The aim is to present insights into the contested configuration of market- and community-based care arrangements within the context of intersecting movements, economic principles, institutional logics, power relations, images of care, and social inequalities.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses how house and care work is organised, shared and negotiated in a housing commons. Through this case, I show how the democratisation of care entails the socialisation of reproductive work and the de-commodification and affordability of reproductive spaces.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyses how house and care work is organised, shared and negotiated in a housing project known as La Borda. This project is part of an emerging self-managed housing cooperative model in the city of Barcelona based on public-common partnerships. The findings of this paper are informed by 10 months of qualitative research based on in-depth interviews and participant observation. I treat La Borda as a housing commons, in contrast to co-housing, because it guarantees de-commodification, promotes self-management and socialises reproductive work. The literature on cohousing tends to keep the collectivisation/democratisation of homes and de-commodification of housing as two unrelated phenomena. This often means that cohousing projects in urban spaces become an alternative for the privileged few. I argue that struggles for the collectivisation of social reproduction and the decommodification of space must be thought of together. I situate La Borda in a tradition of social reproduction struggles that have challenged the separation of private and public spheres, and the household economy from the economy. In this housing project, elements such as collective self-management, participatory democracy, and the co-production of space have created some conditions for sharing and visibilising home-based reproductive work while creating systems of accountability and renegotiation. However, I show that despite their non-speculative character, the projects under this model are not accessible to everyone. In arguing that democratisation of care entails the decommodification and affordability of reproductive spaces, I detail the policies and public-common partnerships that could soften the socio-economic and cultural boundaries surrounding housing commons.