Resourcing Care - Abstracts
Renu Addlakha, Centre for Women’s Development Studies, Delhi, India
Transacting Informal Care in Families and Organisations: The case of Disability in India
Care is an integral part of society, critical not only to the biological survival of the human species but also to economic growth and social reproduction. In addition to the bearing and rearing of children, negotiating with the inevitable contingencies of life such as disease, disability and death foreground the issue of care at both micro and macro levels. Another significant feature of care is its universal trans-historical ‘naturalised’ association with women through the processes of biological reproduction and motherhood. Similarly, care is at the same time inextricably intertwined with other structures of inequality like race, social class and caste.
Care and disability are inextricably connected. They intersect across disciplines, legal discourses, policy interventions and technological innovations. In this paper, I will just focus on a slice of this multi-dimensional interface, namely disability and care work with particular reference to contemporary urban India. In the era of neo-liberal economics and global capitalism, the state is withdrawing from the care economy with alarming rapidity. This means that other institutions involved in care like the family/household, markets and the not-for-profit sector (including voluntary and community provision) are forced into playing a bigger role. Demographic factors like the rising ageing populations, higher levels of chronic morbidity and disability in younger population cohorts are further contributing to burdening the care economy.
Care work is an essential component of disability, be it in the form of medical treatment and rehabilitation or simple assistance by family members in the management of activities of daily living. Even when the state plays a proactive role through welfare provisioning, the family is the fulcrum of management and care. Research with a cross-section of disabled persons and their families in Delhi highlights core practical, conceptual, policy and philosophical issues that frame the life experiences of both those giving and receiving long-term care. It is the purpose of this paper to discuss the day-to-day dilemmas faced by family care-givers in the almost total absence of outside support. The other side of the care dyad is the experience of being cared for in a social context characterised by limited resources and life opportunities. This micro-reality unfolds in a politico-economic context dominated by a strong ideology of human rights and identity politics backed by minuscule funding for the disability sector. The paper will attempt to establish connections between the micro-politics off care as they unfold in the family and the larger social and political trends of a growing economy in an era of globalisation.
Donatella Alessandrini, Law, University of Kent, UK
A Social Provisioning Employer of Last Resort? Social reproduction and alternative valorisation processes
In this paper I reflect on recent attempts by feminist economists to engage with post-Keynesian policies aimed at the socialisation of investment, in particular the proposal for the government to act at once as the Employer of Last Resort (ELR) and a social provider. Distancing itself from attempts to allocate unemployed workers among scarcely available jobs as well as from welfare programs based on the punitive mean-tested approach to securing income, the ELR proposal seems to go a long way to address economic and social uncertainty and to challenge socially created scarcity. As such it appeals to feminist economists who have long campaigned for the inclusion of the process of social reproduction in the general analytical framework of political economy. What seems to be at stake in such an engagement is not only the incorporation of caring labour within the creation of new jobs but the re-conceptualisation of the whole spectrum of activities encompassing the broad terrain on which the re-production of life is made possible, from child care to health care, from care for the elderly to environmental care, from restoration to engineering, from transport to housing, from manufacturing to finance. At issue in other words is the possibility to redefine the meaning of work as well as that of production.
However, while focusing on this potential, I also want to explore the concern that programs such as ELR might end up sustaining, rather than undoing, capitalist relations. Indeed, the fact that the whole program remains an institution of wage labour invites careful consideration of the consequences of adopting a macroeconomic policy that might very well end up preserving the very capitalist relations which it seeks to affect. This is a crucial point and one which resonates with the argument feminist autonomists have made in the 1970s not only against the wage society, which has made people dependent on wages for their survival while simultaneously denying access to work; but also against the welfare state, which they saw as the protector and guarantor of a social division of labour that promotes cooperation at the point of production and atomisation and separation at the point of reproduction (see Dalla Costa, 2002; Fortunati, 2007:146; Federici, 2008:9). This is for instance why they refused to place reformist demands on the state, particularly in relation to the socialisation of domestic labour, and focused instead on the collectivisation of social reproduction through the creation of self-managed and alternative social services. Yet, rather than seeing these two moments of feminist struggle over social reproduction in opposition to one another, I want to trace their continuities in thinking of alternative processes of (non-capitalist) valorisation and the arrangements which might be able to sustain them.
Martha Augoustinos, Psychology, University of Adelaide, with Damien Riggs, Social Work, University of Flinders, Australia
‘Basically it’s a recognition issue’: Validating foster parent identities
This paper raises issues about recognition in foster care in Australia that are seldom given space within the literature, public policy or advocacy in foster care. We draw on qualitative data collected at a public forum on foster care in South Australia to argue that recognition of foster care should extend beyond the acknowledgment of ‘service provision’ and must encompass the needs of foster carers to be validated as people of worth. This is particularly the case in a system that often presents conflicting representations of foster carers, and which can result in a failure to validate the identities that foster carers have of themselves. This issue is examined within current debates around the professionalisation of foster care and what Kirton (2001) refers to as the intersection between ‘love and money’.
Marian Barnes, Social Policy, University of Brighton, UK
Care in Everyday Life: care ethics and friendship
One of the central insights of work on feminist care ethics is that care is something that matters to everyone, it cannot and should not be considered as relevant only to those defined as ‘care receivers’ within health and social care services. Relatedly, Tronto and Fisher’s definition of care includes both self care and the environment within the ‘web’ of care. Taking these insights as my starting point, my book ‘Care in Everyday Life: an ethic of care in practice’ seeks to apply an ethic of care to diverse relationships and contexts, one of which is ‘friendship’. Friendship receives little attention within mainstream social policy. I argue that this is an unfortunate lacuna and that it is important to understand the significance of friendship in order to develop social policies that can support a diversity of caring relationships, and which recognise the role of collective support as well as individualised services. I also consider what a focus on friendship can offer to understanding the nature of care in different contexts, in particular to consider the significance of shared experiences, the exercise of power, and the role of care in supporting diversity and political action.
Chris Beasley with Carol Bacchi, Politics, University of Adelaide, Australia
From Care to Social Flesh: Making Politics Fleshly
This paper attends to one of the central foci of the workshop. It deals with the issue of the possible limitations of care as a normative and conceptual framework and is particularly attentive to limitations that may be argued to arise in terms of the capacity of care to attend adequately to inequality—including gendered inequality, embodiment and sexuality. Care gives attention to crucial labours associated with dependency and responsibility—such as childcare—and thus provides a means to address embodied social interconnection and to challenge the prevailing neo-liberal ethos of individual choice and ‘rational’ (read self-interested cognitive) decision-making. Nevertheless, care is focussed upon a particular range of relationships or social practices, is insufficiently attentive to inequalities associated with these relationships and practices, and deals only with quite specific aspects of embodiment which do not encompass sexuality. The paper proposes an alternative approach by reference to a terminology of ‘social flesh’. This terminology is advanced in order to attend to concerns around ‘need’ with which care is associated, but to also offer a more expansive understanding of embodied inter-subjectivity which simultaneously enables a more extensive challenge to neo-liberalism.
Jo Bridgeman, Law, University of Sussex, UK
Relational Responsibility and Resourcing Care
This paper examines the contribution of the feminist ethic of care to conceptualisation of responsibility as relational. An understanding of responsibility as relational, I argue, demands recognition of both the separateness of the cared for and the connectedness between carer and the one for whom they care. As a contextual approach it requires recognition that the ability to care is not solely self-determined but is reliant upon external factors beyond the control of the carer, including the dependency of the carer upon others involved in the provision of care and, in particular, the provision of resources required to care. With reference to a range of examples from healthcare and the care of children, I seek to explain how an understanding of responsibilities as relational would impact upon the legal regulation of caring relationships.
Helen Carr, Law, University of Kent, UK
Older Women’s Co-Housing
Adult social care is in crisis. The community is being called upon to respond to the needs of an ageing population. But because communities and families are fragmented the elderly are isolated and lonely. At the same time there is a housing crisis, and a perception that the older generation is holding on to a disproportionate share of housing wealth. Recently the government suggested that older people should go back to work and downsize their houses as the solution to these social ills. In such an atmosphere it is difficult to understand why a group of older women re-imagining care productively by organising to set up a housing co-operative have not succeeded. After all their aspirations speak to the big society and individual endeavour. Their website indicates that the intention is ‘to build a ‘living group’ where we will promote our own health and well-being through self-reliance, co-operation, companionship and mutual support. Our community will be actively managed by us, its residents. We want to create an environment where diversity is welcomed and everyone is valued equally regardless of class, ethnic background, belief, disability or sexual orientation. We will be a community where we value, share and develop each others’ skills and talents’. This paper is interested in the failure of older women’s co-housing and draws upon Actor Network Theory to see if it can provide insights into that failure.
Anja Eleveld, Law, Leiden University, The Netherlands
A feminist perspective on care rights in the age of biopolitics
This paper seeks to respond to the question if and how a woman’s right to care can be defended within a poststructuralist theoretical framework that will neither lead to an intensification of existing biopolitical structures, nor fall into the essentialist trap of culturalist feminism. Against the work of Giorgio Agamben and Ruth Miller this paper argues that that rights are not necessarily the expression of biopolitical power, they may also provide an escape from biopolitical configurations of power. That is, as long as rights remain unrestricted rights that are open to alteration, rights can enable the access to freedom practices for everyone, including women. Following Linda Zerilli’s interpretation of the ‘the political’, this paper further defends the view that it is possible to defend a women’s right to care from a poststructuralist feminist perspective on the condition that these right claims are raised by women themselves.
Fabienne Emmerich, Law, Keele University, UK
Rejecting Care? The resocialisation of RAF/J2M prisoners in Germany
This paper draws on the personal narratives of five former women and men Red Army Faction (RAF) prisoners in order to analyse resocialisation from the perspective of the excluded. Resocialisation reflects an inclusive, caring approach to imprisonment and is the overriding purpose of imprisonment as set out in the German Prison Act 1976. Prisoners as citizens (Chanteraine, 2010) and consequently rights’ bearers (Lazarus, 2006) are encouraged to participate in their own treatment and to share responsibility for their successful re-intergration into society (Laubenthal, 2007). Through the use of the RAF narratives I explore the challenges and contradictions to this inclusive approach to imprisonment. In particular, I focus on the challenged posed by those prisoners who cannot, or will not, participate in their own care. The RAF prisoners, also known as the Baader Meinhof Group served long sentences for offences related to the armed struggle to overthrow the (West) German government during the 1970s, and include one family member who served time as a sympathiser. Their stories were collected through extensive semi-structured interviews. They are subjective accounts located within a violent conflict that polarised German society, partly because of their allegations of maltreatment in prison and of their collective resistance through hunger strike and other means.
Ruth Fletcher, Law, Keele University, UK
Caring on the periphery: The Crisis Pregnancy Agency and cross-border flows for abortion care
This paper analyses the development of peripheral forms of care through a study of the (Irish) Crisis Pregnancy Agency’s governance of an outward flow for abortion care. I show how the Agency has employed 4 key technologies in governing this flow: non-development of local abortion services, provision of support for exit, reporting of extra-territorial abortion rates, and promotion of aftercare on return. These technologies illustrate how state agencies may actively mobilise peripheral logic as they claim to address local care needs through reliance on extra-territorial provision. In the process, they render care peripheral in spatial, economic and normative terms. Care becomes peripheral in a spatial sense as governance operates on the margins of transnational flows for healthcare services and limits care provision to the spaces of jurisdictional exit and return. Economically, care becomes peripheral when public funding is directed towards secondary support services such as the provision of information, counselling and aftercare, rather than towards the provision of the core healthcare service itself. Caring on the periphery makes the normative assumption that states meet their sovereign responsibilities to provide for healthcare needs by permitting and partially supporting their residents’ use of healthcare services in other jurisdictions. Peripheral care also assumes that support for extra-territorial use of care, which would not be legal at home, is normatively consistent. In this way, peripheral logic manages women’s reproductive vitality not simply by denying them access to public healthcare, but by making their access to care a transnational, insecure and precarious affair.