It's Crowded at the Bottom

Trust, visibility, and the deepening of existing inequalities are major themes within the platform care work literature. However, no study to date has applied these themes to an analysis of worker profiles. I investigate both how workers communicate trustworthiness through their profiles on Care.com, the world’s largest care work platform, and which of these profiles are rendered more and less visible to clients. Through a qualitative content analysis of profiles (n=60) sampled from the top and bottom search results in three different US zip codes, I find that visibility is often related to connectivity, response time, and positive reviews, and who is rendered visible mirrors preexisting inequalities. The language of “passion” for the job is common across top and bottom profiles, indicating a contradiction between the deemphasis on professionalization and the high level of connectivity and responsiveness present in top profiles.

Making Migrants’ Input Invisible: Intersections of Privilege and Otherness From a Multilevel Perspective

For some years, the German public has been debating the case of migrant workers receiving German benefits for children living abroad, which has been scandalised as a case of “benefit tourism.” This points to a failure to recognise a striking imbalance between the output of the German welfare state to migrants and the input it receives from migrant domestic workers. In this article I discuss how this input is being rendered invisible or at least underappreciated by sexist, racist, and classist practices of othering. To illustrate the point, I will use examples from two empirical research projects that looked into how families in Germany outsource various forms of reproductive work to both female and male migrants from Eastern Europe. Drawing on the concept of othering developed in feminist and postcolonial literature and their ideas of how privileges and disadvantages are interconnected, I will put this example into the context of literature on racism, gender, and care work migration. I show how migrant workers fail to live up to the normative standards of work, family life, and gender relations and norms set by a sedentary society. A complex interaction of supposedly “natural” and “objective” differences between “us” and “them” are at work to justify everyday discrimination against migrants and their institutional exclusion. These processes are also reflected in current political and public debates on the commodification and transnationalisation of care.

Impacts of COVID-19 on parents with small children in South Korea: survey findings and policy implications

The COVID-19 pandemic has emphasised the importance of care and care work, and exposed pre-existing inequalities. Our survey of the impacts of COVID-19 on parents with small children in South Korea reveals that mothers were much more likely to bear the increased burden of childcare than fathers, which, in turn, had direct and negative impacts on their well-being. We discuss how South Korea’s dualised labour market, gender-biased employment practice, social norms about childcare and instrumental approach to family and care policies may have contributed to the persistent unequal distribution of unpaid care work within households and gender inequality.

The epistemological complexity of ideal care: long-term care professionals’ perspectives

The article elaborates what aspects of knowledge eldercare workers describe concerning everyday long-term care practices. The article utilises a thematic analysis of Finnish long-term care workers’ semi-structured interviews (n = 25), and in doing so, it contributes to the discussion concerning the epistemological basis of care. The analysis specifies four aspects of knowledge in long-term care work: objective/objectifying, particular, corporeal and tacit. In line with existing literature on knowledge and care, the findings indicate that rational-technical epistemological approaches are insufficient when complex and fluid care relations are concerned. Moreover, cognitive impairments and other particularities of eldercare provide previously under-researched epistemological perspectives for consideration.

GENDERIZING CONSEQUENCES OF FAMILY POLICIES IN POLAND IN 2010S: A SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

The aim of this paper is to analyze four reforms introduced in the Polish family system in the 2010s. The reforms were introduced as an answer to a problem of very low fertility rates, as well as instruments helping women in achieving their work-life balance. The reforms are analyzed here in terms of their (de)genderization effects on Polish mothers and fathers. The use of a genderization-degenderization axis shows that the gendered division of domestic and care work is not challenged by the reforms, but it is rather reinforced by them. It is also doubtful if the reforms will manage to reverse current demographic trends.

Prácticas culturales colaborativas y sociabilidad débil. Una caracterización a partir de experiencias autogestivas en Tijuana y Monterrey, México

Although research on collaborative artistic projects and practices tend to emphasize the social ties and even the production of communities that they enact, normally, this very research does not pay attention to the singularity of the forms of sociality produced. This article engages in a double task –namely, a theoretical definition and an analytical application– derived from the fieldwork undertaken in the Mexican cities of Tijuana and Monterrey by means of which we developed the notion of “weak sociality” to name the modes of relationships produced by cultural actors from civil society enrolled in independent spaces or projects. We hold that the sociality these strategies produce is conflictive, ephemeral, spatially bound and affective. Both, our theoretical stance as well as our fieldwork findings will make us conclude that the relationships produced in this microspaces –where conflict is productive, ephemerality means open ended negotiations and affect implies care– work as an unavoidable process for the politicization of artistic collaborative practice in the neoliberal city. Si bien la investigación sobre prácticas y proyectos artísticos colaborativos suele enfatizar los lazos sociales e, incluso, la producción de comunidad que estos generan, es frecuente que no se atienda a la singularidad de las formas de sociabilidad que ahí se articulan. Este artículo propone un doble ejercicio, de definición teórica y de aplicación analítica, a partir del trabajo empírico realizado en las ciudades mexicanas de Tijuana y Monterrey. En nuestro análisis proponemos la noción de “sociabilidad débil” para nombrar los modos de relación producidos por agentes culturales de la sociedad civil en espacios o proyectos independientes. Sostenemos, así, que la sociabilidad que producen estas estrategias es conflictiva, efímera, espacialmente delimitada y afectiva. Tanto nuestra postura teórica como los hallazgos de nuestro trabajo de campo nos llevarán a concluir que las relaciones gestadas en estos microespacios –donde el conflicto es productivo, lo efímero predispone a la negociación y el afecto es cuidado– operan como un proceso imprescindible para la politización de las prácticas artísticas colaborativas en la ciudad neoliberal.

Florence Nightingale and Responsibility for Healthcare in the Home

The focus for this article is the approach taken by the famous British nurse and public health reformer Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) to responsibility for care, with particular reference to healthcare as practised in the home. It begins by examining Nightingale’s involvement as a young woman in ‘Lady Bountiful’ style upper-class charitable health visiting in the period before 1850. It goes on to consider the district nursing model designed by Nightingale and William Rathbone in the 1860s as an attempt to adapt this localised model of charitable care to the demands of industrial Victorian cities. The final section broadens the lens to examine Nightingale’s views on religious vocations in care work and the state’s expanding role in regulating the nursing profession. Nightingale’s ideal vision of care combined multiple elements: attachment to a local community, a sense of religious vocation, and the scalability and fundraising of national or governmental organizations.

Care Work and Academic Motherhood: Challenges for Research and Tenure in the Canadian University

In Canada, women are earning an increasing number of doctoral degrees; yet, they are less likely to secure a tenure-track position. A feminist thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 20 academic mothers from two Canadian universities reveals the range of challenges that mothers encounter in relation to care on the tenure-track. First, the theme of “fear of post-partum academic erasure” captured faculty mothers’ experiences of feeling compelled to assert their physical and intellectual presence in post-partum during peak periods of infant care. The second theme, “the mommy tenure track and care choices,” encapsulated academic mothers’ experiences of feeling unsupported by the university in their pursuit of promotion and tenure given care responsibilities associated with motherhood. The final theme, “research while caring,” captured the tensions academic mothers experience between the research process and caring. The findings of this research are particularly relevant in a pandemic and post-pandemic environment, where academic mothers have seen their care work swell to unprecedented proportions.

Becoming Fluent in Fieldwork: (Un)learning What Is Good/Ethical/Responsible Fieldwork

This running theme’s introduction rethinks fieldwork as an ongoing process. It explores experiences and conceptions of ‘becoming fluent in fieldwork’: the contextual processes through which we do, learn, and unlearn practices of fieldwork. It sees fieldwork as a collective project. Recognising the entanglement of field sites and travelling with fields to certain other fields, we become multiply entangled, and thus we ask: what do these plural relations demand from us? We turn to the concept and praxis of love as it considers the responsibility, care work and thinking-working together that is needed to respect other people’s realities together with them. We foreground the notion of ‘becoming fluent’ that reflects fieldwork as a work in process, and emphasises the processual aspects of fieldwork: the journey that spans the time before, during and after the fieldwork. This process involves engaging meaningfully with relations, relationality and collaboration, ‘ongoingness’ and ethics in motion.