Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

The paper examines how marketized and financialized senior care in CEE reshapes everyday landscapes of care. Based on ethnographic research in the Czech Republic, it shows how care extractivism structures ageing and the lives of local and migrant care workers, deepening precarity and stratification.

Paper long abstract

Processes of marketization and financialization are transforming senior care across Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), producing new forms of social and economic inequality. The rapid expansion of residential facilities - often privately operated, semi-regulated, and driven by investment capital - illustrates how care provision has become a terrain for profit-making and speculative growth. These developments generate temporary “care fixes” (Dowling, 2021) that address systemic gaps while simultaneously reproducing structural vulnerabilities.

In my paper, I will conceptualize these transformations through the lens of landscapes of care (Milligan & Wiles, 2010), tracing how care is organized, commodified, and mobilized across households, institutions, and national borders. These shifts constitute a form of care extractivism: the systematic extraction of value from the labor, mobility, and vulnerabilities of both local and migrant caregivers (Uhde & Gheorghiev, 2025). Financialized logics of efficiency, risk, and return intensify the precarity of care workers, producing differentiated forms of ethnic, classed, and gendered hierarchization, while simultaneously creating zones of social abandonment (Biehl, 2005) for the most vulnerable seniors.

Drawing on the series of research projects I show how the Czech Republic functions as a laboratory of financialized senior care, revealing how these landscapes produce uneven access, dependency, and stratification, while generating new modalities of care provision. Overall, this analysis highlights how care crises, marketization, and financialization reshape the material and social infrastructures that sustain older adults and the local and migrant workers who care for them.