Caring in domestic spaces: inequalities and housing

This chapter examines how attention to issues of care could alter approaches to housing policy. It focuses on the interplay between housing and social inequalities. It contributes to intersectional analyses of care practices by combining analysis of the material, symbolic and economic aspects of housing’s intersections with caring relationships within the home. It discusses the role of housing in care as: an asset to finance care; as a built form; as a source of identity and ontological security; and as a base for fostering networks of support. It shows that that these wider implications of viewing dwellings as sites of care are significant for housing and wider social policy.

Introduction: the new politics of home

This chapter sets the following chapters within an overall landscape of social policy, governance and economic changes. It will assess the current political and economic moment in terms of austerity and welfare reform and set out some of the conceptual and theoretical resources, around care, crisis, and the home, as they are drawn on in the rest of the book. It also introduces the rest of the chapters.

Spaces of care beyond the home: austerity and children’s services

This chapter examines a shift within UK social policy away from neighbourhood infrastructures of policy and services under conditions of austerity. The loss of these services are creating increasingly fragmented and unequal contexts in relation to local landscapes of care and support for families. The chapter draws on research about Sure Start Children’s Centres, which can be seen as crucial ‘in-between’ or ‘home-like’ spaces, linking care at home with wider networks and resources. The paper focuses on services, closures, activism and governance relating to the centres which were aimed at children under five and their families.

Relational biographies in times of austerity: family, home and care

Drawing on thinking across human geography and sociology, and engaging with key concepts of caringscapes, personal lives and the lifecourse, this chapter argues for greater consideration of the impact that austerity can have on both personal and relational biographies. Findings in the form of ethnographic accounts and vignettes from recent research with families and communities in Greater Manchester, UK, regarding everyday life in austerity, and particularly using findings from a biographical mapping tool developed by the author, are reported. Using these data, the chapter makes the case for developing both concepts and methods for understanding social and personal lives in times of austerity and crisis.

Conclusion: opening up the politics of the home

This final chapter draws together some of the conceptual, methodological and normative threads from preceding chapters to point towards ways to reimagine home and care within research and also in wider politics. The chapter considers how to make the politics of the home more ‘visible’ when crises are often absorbed into everyday lives. Feminist analysis suggests the need to consider new forms of citizenship and political action which can link the home space to wider sites of politics.

Home economics: home and care in neoliberal policy

In the continuing transfer of responsibility for social care from state institutions to communities and home spaces the economic value of home, women’s labour and personal resources, is anticipated and taken for granted. Working with feminist theory and policy analysis this chapter explores the complex ways that home is inscribed in policy language to make intimate and personal resources economically available for the informal delivery of social care. The author argues that home is a key mechanism for shaping a new economy of care in contemporary politics and policy making.