Paper short abstract:

At University of Bayreuth, the German state responded to the Covid-19 Pandemic by establishing rigid boundaries between caregivers and care-receivers, constructing its diverse affiliates as either one - in conflict with the empirical realities of multiple overlapping care roles and responsibilites.

Paper long abstract:

The onset of the Covid-19 has fundamentally changed everyday university life: The sudden switch to working from home while caring for children, the ad-hoc adoption of digital teaching/learning, and the restriction of personal contact between fellow students and colleagues are just some aspects of the profound transformation university affiliates of diverse status groups had to deal with. This transformation is studied in the mixed-methods research project CovCare@UBT at one particular German university, the University of Bayreuth (UBT).

For many participants, this time is remembered as one of deep crisis, exhaustion, and overwhelm, which is the result of a collapse of existing practices and regimes of care. With the state relegating care (back) to the nuclear family and shutting down its institutions of childcare for months, upholding wage work, academic qualification, childcare and schooling became an almost unattainable tightrope walk.

The state in its manifestation of the UBT administration responded to the pandemic by un/doing boundaries between caregivers and care-receivers, and assigning roles of giving or receiving care to its affiliates. This policy response was at times corresponding to, at times troubling the multiple care responsibilities and networks my respondents were embedded in, leading to a spectrum of outcomes that complicate the dominant notion of the crisis as a “burning glass” for inequalities. Departing from empirical examples, this paper seeks to carefully analyse who was drawn back by the sudden change of care, who got through the crisis fairly well – and who even benefitted from new modes of caring.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how Covid interventions resulted in the surge of care burdens on families with autistic children in Yokosuka in the backdrop of the neoliberal shift in Japan’s welfare regime. It discusses why the mainstream theoretical construction of care falls short of reversing the situation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper inquires how the Covid pandemic affected families with autistic children and daycare service operators in Yokosuka in the backdrop of the “neoliberal shift” in Japan’s welfare regime during the last decade. Based on interviews conducted since October 2021, it examines how the pandemic responses resulted in an excessive burden on mothers and daycare workers. It also demonstrates how the process was accelerated by the neoliberal shift in the welfare regime that has promoted for-profit welfare businesses since 2005. I argue that the pandemic measures, characterized by elaborate risk-control procedures and stay-home policies, operated on problematic assumptions that designate care work as unlimited responsibility and human agency endowed with unbound flexibility. I further argue that the mainstream theoretical construction of care, which often focuses on responsibility, improvisation, and sympathy, may not help us maintain a caring environment in deeply uncertain times. I have two points to support my argument. First, the value of being responsive––producing a desired reaction to someone appropriately or sympathetically––provides a wide opening through which neoliberal moralities capture parents and care workers. Second, repetition and habituation (instead of improvisation and responsiveness) are often the essential premises for improving the living conditions of those cared for while simultaneously controlling the burden of caregivers. Reimagining the modes of autistic care to address the empirical and theoretical problems requires an anthropological theory of care committed to focusing on embodied practices involved in the process and embracing the fragile environment in which those practices are located.

Paper short abstract:

The interest of this article lies in identifying the background of the responsibility's discourse and analysing the profile of home-based family caregivers, that can help us drive a more equitable and democratic social organization of care.

Paper long abstract:

During the covid-19 pandemic there was a return to family-based care provision in the home, intensifying the difficulties faced by families when organising home-based care for persons in a situation of dependency.

In this paper, we start from the basis that the spanish model is not only cultural but political and family-based, as a result of the lack of public investment in the care system for the elderly and the disabled.

We will analyse the profile of the situations of home-based family caregivers, in order to identify typologies that will aid our understanding of the construction of the sense of responsibility for care. We are also interested in delving into the meaning of this responsibility, how it is perceived by families, how it is experienced and how it is defined by caregivers. Gender, social class and kinship are essential variables for interpreting this sense of responsibility. Identifying the background of the discourse of responsibility can help us drive a more equitable and more democratic social organisation of care to overcome the inequalities of the current model.

The data on which our reflections are based stem from in-depth interviews with men and women caregivers of family members in varying states of health, within the home, in Spain. This ethnography is included in the project: “The model of long-term care in transition: the impact of Covid-19 on family-based organisation of care”.

Paper short abstract:

The transformation of knowledge related to long-term care: implications for transiting change and trust-building.

Paper long abstract:

The actual systemic crisis manifests the profound changes which are taking place in contemporary long-term care systems, leading to new care modalities in society. Through 26 interviews conducted with caregivers, family members, and older adults with care needs, this communication presents the study that aims to make visible the transformation in the conceptions of care in the Basque Country (north of Spain). The results revealed the socio-cognitive tensions and transformations experienced by the actors, through three main processes. The first process shows the displacement of familialist ideas in favor of individualization; the second, the contextual validation of the institutionalization and outsourcing of care; the third, the hybridization of ideas that lead to new care modalities, such as professionalization and personalization. The relevance of a dynamic and situated approach to the theory of social representations, and its contribution to the analysis of new knowledge disseminated in a changing cultural and organizational context are discussed. The potential of the findings for promoting collective trust in care provision are also examined, considering the actor´s diverse dialogues and positions.

Keywords: cognitive polyphasia, care model transition, social representations, trust.

Paper short abstract:

This paper undertakes a critical analysis of public and social policies pertaining to the rights of care in Venezuela, with the purpose of exploring the conditions that have led to the current crisis, resulting in a clear transformation of the social organization of care.

Paper long abstract:

This paper undertakes a critical analysis of public and social policies pertaining to the rights of care in Venezuela, with the purpose of exploring the political, economic, social, and cultural conditions that have led to the current crisis, resulting in a clear transformation of the social organization of care, marked by the fragmentation of family units due to large-scale migration projects and the collapse of the welfare state. To accomplish this analysis, we concentrate on ethnographic material collected during an initial fieldwork in Spain in 2022 and a subsequent fieldwork stage in Venezuela in 2023. The objective is to identify the care and subsistence strategies that transnational families deploy to sustain the lives of older people currently residing in Venezuela, who are affected by two interrelated aspects. The first pertains to the diaspora, 25% of the total population have left the territory and 95% of this figure is composed of people between 15 and 45 years old, which means an important part of the families -who historically have assumed care work- have migrated and the older population remains isolated to a greater extent. The second aspect refers to the chronic condition of a complex and multifactorial crisis that continually renews its contingencies, limiting the possibilities of care and subjecting older people to conditions of vulnerability that endanger their lives.

Paper short abstract:

The aim of this paper is to analyse the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Galician nursing home system and to explore the reforms carried out by the different public administrations in the last 4 years, using a mixed methodology that combines documentary analysis and in-depth interviews.

Paper long abstract:

Nursing homes were one of the epicenters of the COVID-19 pandemic in Spanish territory. After the first year of the pandemic, 30,103 people living in nursing homes had died from COVID-19, representing 41.7% of total deaths from Covid-19. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed some of the structural problems of the Spanish nursing home system: problems of intergovernmental governance and social and health care coordination, understaffed social care staff, job precarity, oversized centers, etc. All this in a multilevel governance model, in which there are as many nursing home systems as there are regional governments. But the pandemic has also accelerated the process of rethinking the Spanish nursing home model, promoting political measures to advance the process of deinstitutionalization of care.

The aim of this communication is twofold. First, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Galician nursing home system is analyzed, using a mixed methodology that combines macro -through statistical techniques and documentary review- and micro analysis -through interviews with workers. Next, the measures deployed by the Galician regional government to reform the nursing home system in the post-covid era are explored, using documentary analysis and interviews with key informants. It concludes with a descriptive analysis of the CAM programme of the Diputación Provincial de Lugo, a provincial system of mini-residences located in rural areas that is presented as an alternative to the regional model. The conclusions highlight the ambiguous and uncertain advances in social policy that have been made in the last four years.

Paper short abstract:

The purpose of this research is to explore the different strategies of management, organisation and activation of resources for the care of dependent people carried out by the main caregivers of the families, all of them women and with a first-degree kinship relationship: wife or daughter.

Paper long abstract:

The family is the central institution on which the responsibility for care falls at all stages of life. Within the family, it is mostly women who take on this work, either for free or for little pay. Caring is a practice that cannot be reduced to a set of tasks, as it encompasses multiple dimensions: physical, material and relational, which implies direct care, but also the search for the resources necessary to carry out this care, while activating networks and support to which one has access. This bricolage work, often also juggling, is necessary to fit together the different pieces that make care possible, known as the "mosaic of care resources" (Soronellas et al, 2021). Using a qualitative methodology based on case studies, in this paper we present an analysis of the construction, organisation and transformations of the mosaic of care in three ethnographic cases, focusing on the main caregivers, all of whom are women in the family. Around them the pieces move and articulate, making them the axis from which care is configured. In this way we are able to see how the mosaics are constructed on the basis of hierarchical and unequal kinship and gender relations, in which reciprocity and the moral dimension of care play an important role.

Paper short abstract:

Based on the narrative of mothers from different social classes in Rio de Janeiro/Brazil, the paper analyzes how the closure of daycare centers during the covid-19 pandemic affected the care of young children and the experiences of mothers in middle-classes and poor families

Paper long abstract:

Data from different countries and regions of the world indicate that the sanitary measures related to combating covid-19, in particular the school closure and the social isolation of families in the domestic units, globally impacted the experiences of motherhood and childcare (Green & O'Reilly, 2021). In Brazil, these effects were particularly dramatic because it was one of the countries that kept daycare centers and schools closed for the longest time, although it was, paradoxically, one of the countries that introduced the least lockdown to control the pandemic. The prolonged closure of daycare centers and schools intensified the culturally naturalized process of familiarization and feminization of childcare in the country (Lowenkron, 2022). Having as a backdrop this familial and maternalist ideal of caring for young children in the Brazilian context, associated with a stratified reproduction system characterized by unequal access to material and social resources for raising children and maintaining domestic units (Colen, 1995), this article comparatively analyzes how care arrangements were (re)organized during the covid-19 pandemic and the ways in which women mothers from different social classes who had access to daycare experienced motherhood during the period of suspension of face-to-face activities in public and private early childhood education institutions.

Paper short abstract:

In Cuba, the healthcare system emphasizes community involvement. This paper explores how the pandemic shifted the healthcare system's approach to community participation, by analyzing how the Cuban state assigned unprecedent caregiving roles to diverse groups, extending beyond medical personnel.

Paper long abstract:

In Cuba, Primary Health Care (PHC) is the foundation of the nationally organized state health system. Since 1984, PHC has been implemented through a network of polyclinics and neighborhood health posts (consultorios), focusing on prevention, primary care, community services, and active citizen participation.

During the pandemic, PHC played a crucial role in the national strategy for pandemic control, functioning as a key filter to contain the spread, within a context already marked by a severe economic crisis, increasing vulnerabilities, and deepening socio-economic inequalities.

To support the healthcare system in its fight against COVID-19, efforts extended beyond medical personnel. Leveraging its historical mobilization capacity, the state called upon a broad range of community actors and socio-professional categories, such as students, public workers, etc., assigning unprecedented caregiving responsibilities to the population.

This contribution, grounded in the political anthropology of health, aims to account for local organizational forms, community dynamics, and their integration with health services in managing the effects of the pandemic. Based on a post-COVID-19 ethnography of three health districts (areas de salud) in La Habana and Cienfuegos, it addresses the following question: How did COVID-19 shift the lines in how the healthcare system incorporates community participation?

This paper can contribute to the panel debate on public care policies and crisis responses by presenting a case study of an alternative model of state response to the pandemic, where community participation was considered one of the key measures. It will contextualize this approach, and discuss its contributions and the risks it entails.

Paper short abstract:

How do people perform their care practices and perceive moralities of care according to the possibilities defined by public policies? The paper will address the question based on ethnography in post pandemic Portugal.

Paper long abstract:

The paper delves into the intricate dynamics of how individuals engage in their care practices and perceive moralities of care within the framework established by public policies. Over the past decade, there has been a notable proliferation of care-related legislation across European countries, prompted by the challenges posed by an aging population and an escalating care crisis. The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic further intensified the focus on these issues, compelling institutions and public policies to confront unprecedented challenges. This paper seeks to address the central question through an ethnographic lens, with a specific focus on post-pandemic Portugal. By employing ethnographic methods, the study aims to elucidate the ways in which shifts in public policies manifest in the daily practices and decision-making processes of individuals regarding their care needs and caregiving responsibilities.