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.