Paper short abstract:

We reflect on the limits and potentialities of the aging at home model, highlighting the need to find alternative formulas that can promote the politicisation and social redistribution of care, displacing the central role of the family and women in the provision of care for the elderly.

Paper long abstract:

In Spain, aging at home constitutes a cultural aspiration, underpinned by the weakness of public policies. Families provide care at home following the dictates of gender and kinship, two systems of social ascription that constitute the base of the moral system that organizes the responsibility for caring, contributing to the depoliticization of care.

The shortage and fragmentation of the available resources clash with growing long-term care needs. Moreover, in a context characterised by cuts to public spending, the marketisation of care services has expanded. Consequently, attention to care in the domestic sphere takes place within a mosaic-like model that combines the family, public, private, and community resources available; but this model is hugely unfair and marked by inequalities of gender, class, and migration status, tragically exposed by the crisis brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic. The outbreak of the pandemic has further magnified the role of homes as spaces for care, disrupting the strategies deployed by families, and especially women, in care provision.

Drawing on ethnographic data collected in Catalonia (Spain), in this paper we want to reflect on the limits, contradictions but also the potentialities of the aging at home model. Our starting point is that the home can be a suitable space for aging and caring. However, it is important to find alternative formulas that can promote the politicisation and social redistribution of care, displacing the central role of the family and women in the daily management and provision of care for the elderly in the domestic sphere.

Paper short abstract:

This paper deals with the care homes crisis in Spain during the pandemic. It focuses on the elderly residents’ relatives claims for justice, which led to meaningful processes of political subjectivation. We argue that in this context relatives emerged as main agents of a politicization of care.

Paper long abstract:

The Covid-19 pandemic had a severe impact on the long-term care system in Spain, particularly affecting the care homes for the elderly. According to experts, care homes were politically and epidemiologically left aside, severely affecting the human rights of residents. In this context, their families/relatives reacted by organizing mobilizations and lawsuits against care homes managers and the government. They alleged discriminatory treatment of the elderly and violation of fundamental rights, and show the effects of long-lasting processes of disinvestment on public care services, as well as trends towards privatization. This paper deals with the care homes crisis in Spain from the perspective of the elderly residents’ relatives. It focuses on their claims for justice, which led to meaningful processes of political subjectivation. In line with the long-standing academic debate on politics and care in feminist theory, we argue that, in the context of the Covid-19 crisis, relatives emerged as main agents of a politicization of care, insofar as their demands publicly challenged the care homes model in Spain, they showed the excluding and discriminatory effects of inefficient measures taken by the authorities to respond to the pandemic, and called for an urgent and necessary transformation of the long-term care system in Spain.

Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on the lived experiences of Czech care workers who worked in Germany during the Covid19 pandemic. Following Diddier Fassin´s concept of ‘moral economies,’ the paper analyses the moral status and everyday economies related to the bio-political regime of cross-border care migration.

Paper long abstract:

In Central Europe, the rapid unfolding of state-based measures to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic, implemented in March and April 2020, created many tensions and disparities in the cross-border care market that were politically visible. The closing of borders, and the consequent bio-political regime within the EU, created difficulties for migrant care workers and

the states that rely on their work to provide senior care. The paper focuses on the lived experiences of Czech care workers who worked in live-in settings in Germany during the Covid19 pandemic, based on ethnographic and nethnographic research.

Following Diddier Fassin´s concept of ‘moral economies,’ the paper analyses the moral status of decisions made concerning the pandemic measures and the related circulation of values, sentiments, and emotions. It also explores ‘everyday economies’ manifested through ordinary practices and the shared experiences of care workers with new virus prevention and norms.

The paper discusses how Czech care workers coped with the introduction of new biopolitical measures at the borders and how the pandemic regulations (including testing and vaccination policy) affected their cross-border mobility, which before this had allowed them to coordinate care work in Germany with personal and family life in the Czech Republic. It also discusses the role of social media platforms, which played a crucial role in the virtual support and dissemination of pandemic information, knowledge and individual and collective resistance related to specifics of the mobility of senior care in times of risk.

Paper short abstract:

The system of care for the elderly rests on the shoulders of transnational care workers. When the care chain was disrupted by border closures during the Corona crisis, the system received media attention - and with it activists' demands for de-precarisation of services.

Paper long abstract:

The COVID19 crisis and the associated border closures to curb pandemics in Austria have brought to the surface a long ignored political grievance: the system of care for the elderly only works because more than 30,000 transnational 24-hour personal care workers regularly perform their legalised but in labour law controversial discussed service in private households. Suddenly, however, the necessary transnational care chain was interrupted. In addition to the affected clients, it was not least the caregivers who, in times of increased media attention, demanded an improvement of their working conditions. They received support from self-governing initiatives such as IG24 and even Amnesty International. The initiatives were heard in the basic research for the nursing reform long announced by the federal government. However, whether the demands, among others for salaried employment instead of precarious bogus self-employment, will find their way into a reformed care and nursing system is still written in the stars.

In my lecture, I will discuss the legal and social foundations of the care system. In describing the situation during the Corona crisis, I will not only discuss panic-like rescue attempts by politicians, but above all the increased media attention for the demands of care workers for better working conditions - and not least point out (racist or balkanist) reactions.

The lecture will be visually accompanied by material from the exhibition LINES OF HELP curated by me: https://www.hilfslinien.net/?lang=en

Paper short abstract:

During the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-21, the care and support provided by voluntary mutual aid groups intensified in many local communities. This article develops a feminist social reproduction approach to assessing care and redistribution of mutual aid initiatives in southern England.

Paper long abstract:

Mutual aid groups provided essential support to many people during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-2021 in the UK. This article explores the social and political contexts in which pandemic mutual aid initiatives operated. Although mutual aid initiatives are often associated with leftist and anarchist forms of political activism, I argue for critical attention to how they can be made to serve neoliberal agendas. Drawing on a qualitative study of care and support networks in southern England, carried out during the pandemic crisis of 2020-2021, I show how local government responses to protecting vulnerable citizens during the pandemic crisis relied, to a significant extent, on harnessing the capacities of mutual aid groups and offloading the costs of providing support onto unwaged volunteers. In this talk, I discuss three distinct mutual aid groups, embodying respectively radical leftist, egalitarian and liberal-conservative political commitments, as evident in their members’ views on social rights, civic obligations and appropriate forms of economic (re)distribution. I analyse how local government authorities encompassed, co-opted and selectively took advantage of the help mutual aid groups provided, variously shaping and depoliticizing them. In this way, mutual aid groups of all political persuasions were, to varying extent, drawn into a neoliberal agenda of absorbing the costs of caring for people made vulnerable by the pandemic. My analysis develops a feminist social reproduction approach to the critical understanding of pandemic community activism and mutual aid.

Paper short abstract:

Care as distributed agency aims to decentre freedom as a necessary condition for the possibility of ethics by retaining the ambivalence of care as a productive nexus of inquiry from the standpoint of the situated and embedded co-constitution of material and immaterial human needs.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I examine and conceptualise care as distributed agency with reference to the conjuncture of austerity welfare in post-crisis Portugal. Care as distributed agency aims to elicit the practices, meanings and ethics underpinning the caring labours, efforts and investments sustaining the distribution of resources to meet human needs that maintain, restore and enhance the individual and collective potential and capabilities of agency. I focus on the critical role played by women's various forms of paid and unpaid care work to respond to the material and immaterial needs of impoverished individuals and working-class households. Moving beyond a freedom-centred perspective in ethics, care as distributed agency argues for considering how ethical reasoning, practice, and enactment emerge from distributive struggles to confront and negotiate the tensions between fact and value that shape the identification, fulfilment and valuation of human needs, particularly within conjunctures of shifting economic and political processes.

Paper short abstract:

I will engage with experiences of queer mutualism in urban Italy during the first year of the covid-19 pandemic as a starting point for reflections on how care is being reclaimed, re-imagined, and redefined by queer social movements as central to political and community life.

Paper long abstract:

By focusing on activist experiences of queer mutualism in Bologna (IT) during the covid-19 pandemic, I will reflect on new understandings of care as central to social movements and political life.

Queer mutualism in Italy is historically connected to HIV activism, workers mutual aid networks, CAVs (anti-violence shelters), and to reflections on other intimacies and queer social reproduction; but it gained new relevance during the pandemic. Queer mutual aid networks are tied not only to political claims for welfare changes and care reconfiguration, but as well as to a discursive shift towards a stronger understanding of queerness as a shared material position rather than an identarian category. Indeed, the renewed centrality of mutualism and care in queer discourses highlights aspects of inner and outer lines of class divisions, material and symbolic marginalization and exclusion from mainstream “care” sites and circuits.

Discourses around queer mutualism rendered possible the re-conceptualization and development of counter-narratives of care as conflictual, collective, counter-hegemonic, challenging the unfortunate association of care with (state-medical) repression, which often emerged during the lockdown periods, even within leftist movements. Engaging with needs, desires, and struggles of queer people in the pandemic, mutual aid initiatives pointed at the equal importance of material and immaterial (affective-social-sexual-political) needs, to the need to challenge the narratives around home, family and stable affects as the sole site for care and support – coming from a queer marginal and marginalized position.