Short Abstract

The distribution of care poverty worldwide has mainly been addressed through quantitative methodologies. This panel welcomes papers that employ qualitative and ethnographic approaches to critically explore lived experiences and categories of unmet care needs, both theoretically and empirically.

Long Abstract

Care poverty refers to the deprivation of care coverage resulting from risk factors such as health status, age, gender, socioeconomic status, and the structural provision of healthcare and social care (Kröger et al., 2022). Unlike more general concepts like poverty and care inequalities, care poverty focuses specifically on addressing the predictive factors and potential outcomes of care needs left unmet when individuals do not receive sufficient assistance from both informal and formal sources (Kröger et al., 2022).

Although care poverty research, mostly in relation to eldercare, has sought to measure the distribution of care poverty in different countries (e.g., see Kröger et al., 2022), relatively few qualitative studies have addressed the lived experience of unmet care needs (e.g., Sihto, Van Aerschot, 2021).

As anthropology and ethnographies have begun to pay more attention to care (e.g., Buch 2015; Tickin 2014; Mol et al. 2008), they have stressed the processual nature of polarised identities employed by disciplines such as social policy and/or gerontological studies, e.g., care-giver vs care-receiver, material vs socio-emotional care, informal vs formal care, objective vs subjective needs, rural vs urban communities, native vs migrants. Proposing to think with and beyond these (and other) polarizations, this panel invites contributions that investigate, both theoretically and empirically, unmet care needs in diverse settings and across different ages and disabilities. The papers may: 1) reflect on emic/epistemological categories of unmet care needs; 2) show how social actors negotiate polarised identities while they deal with unmet care needs.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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