Carework

On the Shoulders of Grandmothers can easily be enjoyed by academic as well as nonacademic audience as the life stories hold the core of the book. At the same time, the book is not a simple discussion of the struggles and aspirations of Ukrainian grandmothers but rather a valuable source of riveting insights into the everyday life, and the changing moral and gender order, in the post-Soviet period. The clarity of Solari’s writing and the reflexive account of her dilemmas as a researcher makes the transnational, comparative data engaging and fluent. This work should be included in the shelves of various disciplines such as Gender and Women Studies, Global/ization Studies, and Transnational migration studies as well as Area Studies.

Despite China being the world's factory, its labor market is now primarily service-based with a high level of informality. When formal manufacturing and informal service sectors co-exist, how do workers make their choices? While existing literature focuses on rural migrant workers' experience in the Chinese labor system, this study extends the analytical scope to low-skill urban workers. Drawing on archival, interview, and ethnographic data in a large industrial city in central China, I compare urban women's different trajectories in textile manufacturing and informal domestic service. Building on labor regime studies and Social Reproduction Theory, I develop a framework called "regimes of social reproduction" to explain workers' job choices. I argue that China's post-socialist industrial restructuring has given rise to a public-private hybrid regime of social reproduction, which keeps workers' pension and healthcare schemes in the public domain and pushes childcare, elderly care, and domestic work to the private sphere and then marketizes them. For urban workers, when choosing between formal manufacturing and informal service, it is their position within the regime of social reproduction that plays a decisive role. Their position is assessed along the following two dimensions: (1) the degree of a worker's dependency on the employment-based welfare provisions and (2) the degree of demand for reproductive labor in a worker's family. Challenging the conventional view that formal manufacturing jobs are more desirable than informal service jobs, I conclude that under the current regime of social reproduction, the booming informal service market may provide some best earning opportunities for low-skilled urban workers. However, the same regime has also set significant limits on such opportunities as these urbanites' availability to work is highly contingent on (lack of) demand for reproductive labor from their own family.

Este trabajo busca identificar aprendizajes a nivel de procesos de construcción de iniciativas programáticas de cuidados, y en relación
con principios orientadores y aspectos metodológicos de prestación para las políticas e intervenciones sociales dirigidas al cuidado
domiciliario de personas mayores y a quienes desempeñan esta labor. Metodológicamente, desarrolla una revisión cualitativa del caso del
Programa de Atención Domiciliaria del Adulto Mayor (PADAM), de la Fundación Hogar de Cristo, a través de investigación documental. Algunas conclusiones indican que las iniciativas programáticas de cuidado debiesen considerar tanto las necesidades de la persona mayor que recibe los cuidados, como las de quienes ejercen como cuidadores o cuidadoras. Asimismo, que toda iniciativa de cuidados basada en derechos debiese definir umbrales mínimos de prestación con los sujetos de intervención, los que debiesen ser permanentemente actualizados en pos de avanzar hacia la constante búsqueda
de máximos vinculados con la provisión de cuidados.

The participation of fathers at the earliest stages of child carework can be somewhat undistinguished when mothers handle all of the feeding carework through breastfeeding, but a possible solution to this gender inequity could be to encourage male breastfeeding for fathers. In this study, ten fathers who have a child living with them no older than four years of age were interviewed. A quasi-experimental design was used to examine their thoughts on male breastfeeding before and after they watched an edited version of the film Milk Men and read a handout about facts related to the possibility of male breastfeeding. The findings were examined using a postmodern feminist approach. Fathers had entangled ideas about masculinity and the body or nature that negatively affected their thoughts about the practice, though only one of the fathers overall rejected the idea that men could or should breastfeed. Many of the fathers showed their resistance to the examination of male breastfeeding by tangentially exploring body ownership ideas and using other deflecting strategies. Subverting social norms, three of the fathers were proponents of the idea overall and six of the fathers were on a continuum of  willingness to engage the idea. The positive aspects of male breastfeeding that spoke to some of the fathers were the bonding aspect this type of child carework could involve and the chance for male breastfeeding to lead to more equity among mothers and fathers.

Sciortino, Giuseppe; Finotelli, Claudia, "Closed Memberships in a Mobile World? Welfare States, Welfare Regimes and International Migration" in Talani, Leila Simona, Mcmahon, Simon (eds.), Handbook of the International Political Economy of Migration, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2015, p. 185-209.
ISBN: 9781782549895.
http://www.e-elgar.com/shop/handbook-of-the-international-political-economy-of-migration

Feminist scholars of refugee and immigration studies have shown gender to be the organizing principle for resettlement experiences of newcomers. This chapter, co-authored by researchers and practitioners, focuses on how gendered needs of the Yazidi refugee families in Calgary shaped their resettlement services and experiences. Based on keen observations by staff at the Calgary Catholic Immigration Society and the physicians and healthcare providers at the Mosaic Refugee Clinic in Calgary, combined with in-depth interviews conducted by University of Calgary researchers with nearly all Yazidi families in Calgary (45 families that include 241 family members) we focus on four key aspects: 1. Restructuring of the resettlement program by CCIS to meet the needs of Yazidi women and men, but mainly women; 2.Readjusting healthcare services by gender at the refugee clinic; 3. Care provisions in the families of the Yazidis that was fulfilled by women (internal and external to the families) care providers; and 4. Gendered and un-gendered educational outcomes for the children in Yazidi families. We argue that centering gender-based needs of the Yazidi community in the resettlement services has resulted in a feminist reorientation of the resettlement services and experiences of the Yazidis in Calgary.

This working paper was presented at the Conference on Global Labor Migration: Past and Present, June 20-22, 2019, The International Institute for Social History
Amsterdam, The Netherlands. (DRAFT. Please Do Not Cite Without Permission. Comments Welcome)

Written during the first lockdown, published during the „ second wave“ of Covid-19: The bilingual publication "Curating, Care, and Corona" by Sascia Bailer is many things: a critical questioning, a doubting, a reflecting, sometimes also a plea. But above all it should also enable insight into the 2019/20 curatorial programme on Care at M.1, and invite readers to continue with their own related lines of thought. The text unites five fragments that engage with artistic works and curatorial formats from Sascia Bailer ́s programme, each in the context of societal discourses surrounding #care, #curating, #digitality, #alternativeeconomies and the necessity of #newsocialinfrastructures.

We try to situate care work and care economy on the novel premise of the social reproduction theory of labour. We make use of different documents, drafts, letters from different organizations, policy documents etc., to substantiate our claim that the pandemic situation has cracked open some pivotal aspects of our society and the political-economy on which it thrives and functions: the nexus of capitalism with the existing social normative hierarchies such as patriarchy, brahminical casteism etc. We raise some important methodological issues in doing sociological research like this.

Carers are a group of particular significance to society, who contribute precious time and energy to other people's needs and, simply put, enable society to operate (Tronto 1993). Yet, in many settings, they are largely rendered invisible and misrecognised. This is the case in academia where the figure of the 'bachelor boy' (Edwards 1993) has long prevailed and, linked to this, carers have been 'written out' of higher education narratives. In this article, we reflect on our experience of developing a research-and art-based collaborative project (Fostering a sense of belonging for higher education staff and students with caring responsibilities) which involved the production of a series of drawings shared online and, in the course of the forthcoming months, through campus-based exhibitions (Moreau & Galman 2021). Through comics-based research, we seek to distantiate ourselves from the conventions of academia to expose its carefree norms and how they frame the experiences of carers and non-carers in ways which are diverse, fluid and intersectional. We also seek to encourage the development of social, including writing/drawing, practices which are equitable to all, including carers. Writing and publishing can be exclusionary processes and the arts are not immune to this. However, we argue that the arts do more than enhance accessibility but have the potential to challenge forms of academic writing which have historically 'written out' carers and care work.

The confluence of cosmopolitan ideals, a carefully calculated racial harmony brand and its nation-building project makes Singapore an apt site for problematizing and deconstructing the labor processes of global capitalism. To examine the depths and connections across the spatio-temporal differentiations of the migrant labor regime, this paper will tend to the complex realities of precarious work, worker's agency, and insights into the interaction of industry and private lives within the realm of carework. I will focus specifically on my social encounters with Burmese migrant domestic workers in the context of emancipatory developments and possibilities in Singapore. This research employs original empirical text in the form of migrant workers' oral history excerpts gathered during my time as a volunteer caseworker. Informed by Third World feminist studies, Marxist variants and intersectional critical theory, my narrations of select migrant worker's oral histories and descriptions of migrant community spaces in Singapore will ground the analyses on how workers negotiate unfree labor relations-from organizing a museum exhibition to pursuing litigation against an employer. Above all, this paper brings forth a generative entanglement of migrant labor with solidaristic struggles and liberatory praxes enunciated in these communities.

Feminist scholars explore the gendered aspects of social reproduction within neoliberal contexts where the responsibility for reproducing daily and intergenerational life is shifted onto individuals and civil society groups. Using qualitative data from 665 self-administered online questionnaires and 78 interviews with individual makers living in the United States who fabricated and distributed personal protective equipment (PPE) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we consider the gendered contours of this socially reproductive labor that emerged at the household and community levels in response to a pandemic that has been transformed by decades of neoliberal governance strategies. As makers creatively utilized multiple kinds of labor to provide PPE for others, they both reproduced and subverted gendered inequalities in their households and communities. We draw on the "choreography of care work" literature to develop a conceptual framework for future considerations of social reproduction that highlights how its often ignored intricacies are centrally important to how gendered inequalities are reproduced and/or reworked amid disasters. Like a complex dance that is rewritten and enacted in emergent manners, makers creatively deployed multiple kinds of labor within shifting networks of people, technologies, and institutions to ensure social reproduction during the ongoing pandemic.

This paper explores the complicated relationship between caregivers and their employers, specifically au pairs. I argue that the frequent tension present between au pairs and their host mothers stems from the former’s assumption that the au pair, as a woman, is “naturally” predisposed to fulfill a mothering role, thus, blurring the distinction between what is expected of her as a woman versus an employee assigned to conduct mothering tasks within a given timeframe.

Der Artikel skizziert den Diskurs von Kuratieren als Fürsorge am Beispiel des kuratorischen Projektes CARE am M.1 im ländlichen Raum Norddeutschlands. Er bespricht einzelne kuratorische Formate und künstlerische Ansätze, die auf Partizipation und Fürsorge basieren --  und plädiert für einen Ausbau unserer Infrastrukturen des Zwischenmenschlichen, um die Krise der Fürsorge zu überwinden.

Driven by conceptual notions of the Andes, this intervention offers a normative vision of participatory, ecologically-sound development in South Africa. Re-envisioning production away from the emulation of industrialisation in Europe and East Asia, it also proposes a concrete way to value, socialise and redistribute care.

Using qualitative data collected from fifty-eight African American grandmothers raising grandchildren in skipped-generation households (SGHs), I reveal how and why women in non-normative families, lacking legal protections and publicly recognized authority as parents, must negotiate risk in pursuit of resources. I demonstrate that these grandmothers struggle for economic survival while seeking simultaneously to minimize the risk of losing their grandchildren and maximize their chances of receiving public assistance. I argue that grandmothers in SGHs face significant challenges obtaining government benefits owing to policy eligibility guidelines, street-level implementation, and family dynamics. Ultimately, I illustrate how the severe deprivation experienced by these grandmothers is exacerbated by their exclusion from safety net programs that could help them support the children in their care.

BACKGROUND
France was one of the first countries implementing lockdown measures to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Since families spent more time at home, household and care workloads increased significantly. However, existing findings are mixed in terms of whether this situation contributed to a more gender-egalitarian division of unpaid work.

OBJECTIVE
This paper explores the division of domestic work within couples across two different COVID-19 lockdowns and compares them to the out-of-lockdown period in France. We use the theoretical lenses of time availability, relative resources, and ‘doing gender’ to make sense of these changes.

METHODS
Our longitudinal analyses rely on an original panel study we collected in France between April 2020 and April 2021. It includes a sample of 1,959 observations (of 809 individuals living in couples). We employ the different types of restrictions to mobility and social life imposed during the first year of the pandemic as a contextual background, within which we measure the main drivers of change in the division of unpaid work within couples. We use individual fixed effect regression models to estimate changes in men’s share of unpaid work by time, changes in work conditions, partners’ educational gaps, and types of domestic tasks.

RESULTS
The first lockdown contributed to a slight rebalancing of unpaid work within couples. However, our results show an impact of both absolute and relative time availability on men’s share of unpaid work and that the overall rebalancing of unpaid work hides highly gendered patterns. Indeed, we find men doing more shopping and women doing more child care. This gendered division of labour is slightly more prevalent among couples in which the man is more educated than his partner.

CONTRIBUTION
Our findings suggest the reaffirmation of traditional gender roles even during the exceptional first year of the pandemic in France.

Women who migrate into domestic labour and care work are the single largest female occupational group migrating globally at present.  Their participation in global migration systems has been acknowledged but remains under-theorized. Specifically, the impacts of women migrating into care work i the receiving as well as the sending societies are profound, altering gendered aspects of both societies. We know that migration systems link the women who migrate and the households and organizations that employ domestic and care workers, but how do these migration systems work, and more importantly, what are their impacts on the sending as well as the receiving societies? How do sending and receiving societies regulate women's migration for care work and how do these labour market exchanges take place? How is reproductive labour changed in the reviving society when it is done by women who are subject o multifaceted othering/racializing processes.

Russian-speaking homecare workers deploy two divergent discursive practices—professionalism and sainthood—in understanding carework. These two meaning-making systems
have consequences for how this work is performed and experienced by workers. Surprisingly, the division is not based on gender. Instead, immigration laws filter Jewish and Orthodox
Christian immigrants from the former Soviet Union into two separate sets of resettlement institutions. The characteristics of these separate institutional settings shape the discursive tools available to these two groups, leading Jewish refugees to deploy professionalism while Orthodox Christian immigrants deploy sainthood. These discursive practices affect gendered identities, allowing workers in some cases to renegotiate hegemonic notions of masculinity and create new models of “feminine” caregiving.

Refugee and asylum-seeking mothers perform the duties of carework during and after the complex circumstances associated with irregular journeys and settlement in host countries. Utilizing motherhood as a central frame, the article links policies of border securitization with the tangible gendered consequences they produce in the daily carework of mothers. Past literature has explored gendered implications of border crossings and settlement, but rarely have authors examined these themes in tandem and never in the context of mothers and their carework. Based on narrative interviews with refugee and asylum-seeking mothers, I analyse how mothers' everyday lives and, more specifically, their performance of carework are disrupted during migration, by boat journeys and detention, and after migration, by limited governmental assistance and restricted family reunification in host countries.

Abstract
Feminist scholars of refugee and immigration studies have shown gender to be the organizing principle for resettlement experiences of newcomers. This chapter, co-authored by researchers and practitioners, focuses on how gendered needs of the Yazidi refugee families in Calgary shaped their resettlement services and experiences. Based on keen observations by staff at the Calgary Catholic Immigration Society and the physicians and healthcare providers at the Mosaic Refugee Clinic in Calgary, combined with in-depth interviews conducted by University of Calgary researchers with nearly all Yazidi families in Calgary (45 families that include 241 family members) we focus on four key aspects:
1. Restructuring of the resettlement program by CCIS to meet the needs of Yazidi
women and men, but mainly women;
2.Readjusting healthcare services by gender at the refugee clinic;
3. Care provisions in the families of the Yazidis that was fulfilled by women
(internal and external to the families) care providers; and
4. Gendered and un-gendered educational outcomes for the children in Yazidi
families.
We argue that centering gender-based needs of the Yazidi community
in the resettlement services has resulted in a feminist reorientation of the
resettlement services and experiences of the Yazidis in Calgary.

Résumé
Les universitaires féministes des études sur les réfugiés et l’immigration ont montré que le genre est le principe organisateur des expériences de réinstallation des nouveaux arrivants. Ce chapitre, co-écrit par des chercheurs et des praticiens, met l’accent sur la façon dont less besoins sexospécifiques des familles de réfugiés yazidis à Calgary ont influencé leurs services et leurs expériences de réinstallation. Sur la base d’observations approfondies du personnel de la Calgary Catholic Immigration Society et des médecins et prestataires de soins de santé de la Mosaic Refugee Clinic de Calgary, combinées à des entretiens approfondis menés pardes chercheurs de l’Université de Calgary auprès de presque toutes les familles yazidies de Calgary (45 familles, dont 241 membres de la famille), nous nous concentrons sur quatre
aspects clés :
1. La restructuration du programme de réinstallation par la CCIS pour répondre
aux besoins des femmes et des hommes yazidis, mais surtout des femmes ;
2. Le réajustement des services de santé par genre à la clinique pour réfugiés ;
3. Des dispositions de prise en charge dans les familles des Yazidis qui étaient
assurées par des prestataires de soins féminins (au sein des familles et à
l’extérieur) ; et
4. Les résultats scolaires des enfants des familles yazidies, selon le genre ou non.
Nous soutenons que la prise en compte des besoins sexospécifiques de la
communauté yazidi dans les services de réinstallation a entraîné une
réorientation féministe des services de réinstallation et des expériences des
Yazidis à Calgary

This paper provides a feminist critique of market socialism. I argue that two important socialist values, equality and freedom, can only be realised by a form of socialism that adequately distributes and values tasks associated with social reproduction. My argument proceeds in five steps: first, I outline of the main characteristics of market socialism. Second, I provide an understanding of social reproduction and show that its current organisation raises a feminist concern. Third, I discuss the relation between markets under market socialism and social reproduction and draw implications from this for the market socialist project. Finally, I show that market socialism has the potential to bring about a more equal distribution of responsibility for social reproductive work.

Kein Mensch überlebt ohne Fürsorge. Und dennoch wird Sorgetätigkeit als Voraussetzung von Markt und Gesellschaft stets unsichtbar gemacht und abgewertet. Die Konsequenzen sind jedoch fatal, nicht nur für die Realität der GratisarbeiterInnen.

Diese Arbeit untersucht die einzigartige Bedeutung der Eltern-Kind-Beziehung als unersetzbares Gut im Leben von Erwachsenen, insbesondere Vätern. Basierend auf Brighouse und Swift, wird die Rolle von Zeit mit dem Kind als zentrales Element dieser Beziehung diskutiert. Der empirische Teil beleuchtet den aktuellen Status der Vaterschaft und zeigt auf, wie Väter von diesem essenziellen Gut abgeschnitten werden. Eine vorgestellte Lösung, die Gleichverteilung von Zeit, wird als unzureichend betrachtet. Stattdessen wird auf Grundlage des Fähigkeitenansatzes von Nussbaum eine alternative Perspektive zur Befähigung von Vätern diskutiert. Der Schlussteil gibt einen Überblick über mögliche politische Maßnahmen zur Stärkung der Väter und zieht abschließende Schlussfolgerungen.

This essay argues that Catholic (magisterial) social teaching's division of ethics into public and private creates a structural lacuna which makes it almost impossible to envision a truly just situation for migrant domestic careworkers (MDCs) within the current horizon of Catholic social thought. Drawing on a variety of sociological studies, I conclude that it is easy for MDCs to “disappear” between two countries, two families, and, finally, two sets of ethical norms. If the magisterium genuinely wishes Catholic ethicists to address the plight of these migrant women, normative Catholic social teaching must pay more attention to household sociological realities and more fully absorb the feminist critique of the sharp line between the public and the private, between care and paid work.

Objetivos: recoger aprendizajes conceptuales para las iniciativas de discapacidad mental y determinar qué elementos metodológicos de intervención contribuyen mayormente a la inclusión del colectivo. Materiales y métodos: investigación centrada en el caso de Cecap, Toledo-España.1 Integró herramientas cualitativas (revisión documental y entrevistas a, entre otros, sujetos de intervención) y cuantitativas (ahp datos estudiados con análisis de contenido y estadística. Resultados: la “especificidad” que orienta conceptual y metodológicamente la intervención de Cecap, dialogando con la cif-oms, el modelo social y el enfoque de derechos, entiende al colectivo como personas con características específicas y diferenciadas, al igual que personas sin discapacidad. Metodológicamente, trabajar desde planes individuales de intervención, tiene la mayor prioridad para la inclusión. Conclusiones: las políticas e intervenciones debiesen considerar instrumentos que reconozcan las características e in...

Dans son livre Travail gratuit : la nouvelle exploitation ? paru à l’automne 2018, Maud Simonet analyse des activités aujourd’hui hors « du droit du travail et avec peu ou pas de compensation monétaire et de droits sociaux » à partir des apports théoriques de féministes entourant les débats pour la reconnaissance du travail ménager dans les années 1970. Malgré leur apparente disparité, c’est le travail gratuit qui constitue le fil rouge des différentes activités observées par Simonet : travail numérique, stage nonrémunéré, service civique, workfare, bénévolat. En s’intéressant aux rapports sociaux de sexe, de race et de classe, elle observe ainsi que les travailleurs sans salaire et précaires sont aujourd’hui davantage des travailleuses, et pour la plupart racisées.
L’analyse de Maud Simonet fait écho à la mobilisation étudiante pour les stages rémunérés à laquelle nous avons assisté au printemps 2019 au Québec, mais aussi aux appels à la solidarité et au bénévolat dans le contexte actuel de la pandémie. Dans l’un et l’autre de ces cas, la crise et l’arrêt du travail rendent visibles le fait que les appels au bénévolat et à l’«effort national» se retrouvent dans les domaines traditionnellement féminins ou racisés liés aux sphères de la reproduction sociale, des maisons de retraite aux champs, où, comme le résume Maud Simonet, la « naturalisation, l’invisibilisation et la gratuitisation » du travail profite autant au secteur privé qu’à l’État et participe à la reproduction des inégalités sociales. C’est pourquoi nous l’avons invitée à participer à cette entrevue sur la grève dans les milieux de l’Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche en France qui a été interrompue abruptement par le contexte de crise sanitaire. — AB et AP