Local loops and micro-mobilities of care: Rethinking care in egalitarian contexts

This introduction to the Special Issue Local loops and micro-mobilities of care: Rethinking care in egalitarian contexts argues for the importance of analysing local organizations of care. This is a necessary addition to current scholarship which has focused on the globalization of care. Yet, in many parts of the world, such as the Northern and Eastern European countries, on which this issue focuses, care provision continues to be mainly local and migrant care workers are complementary. Nevertheless, the daily organization of care can be as complex as in the global care chains. To address this local complexity, we propose two concepts: the notion of local care loops and care as patchwork. The concept of local care loops is a sensitizing one that emphasizes routine, daily practices and micro-mobilities of care that create loops around daily practices of care. Patchwork refers to practices that are simultaneously routinized activities but that are also changing from day to day, depending on the available resources and constraints (of time, money, and caregivers), as well as the local geographies and distances that need to be connected in the loops. The introduction also presents the six articles that make up this Special Issue. The articles identify similarities and differences in processes related to the commodification of childcare and transforming gender ideologies in post-socialist and social-democratic welfare societies.

Local loops of care in the metropolitan region of Helsinki: A time-economy perspective

Finland subsidizes caring for young children at home by several cash-for-care schemes. In 2001, it adopted a tax credit for domestic services, including care. This article adopts an everyday perspective to social policies to analyse how Finnish cash-for-care policies produce local care loops using a time-economy approach. It examines the increase in private services alongside public ones through an analysis of the organization of childcare in time and space, paying attention to the micro-mobilities and daily choreographies of care. Drawing on interviews with Finnish employers of privately employed childcarers, our results demonstrate that childcare policies and tax credits are central means through which childcare is increasingly being privatized. We argue that the notion of time as a scarce resource and the organization of care loops in a way that maximizes time available for wage labour and ‘quality time’ point towards the emergence of a classed time discipline. Time becomes a commodity with not only monetary value but also another inherent value, captured in the notion of ‘quality time with children’. Significantly, this quality time does not include time used for other reproductive labour tasks, such as cleaning or cooking.

On an Algebraical Computation of the Tensor and the Curvature for 3-Web

The algebraic methods are used in the web geometry, in particular in the 3-web. Along the line, we suggest a new, alternative algebraic method for computation of the quantities ∇l1ajki, ∇l2ajki, and djklmi by means of the embedding of local loops into Lie groups.