The Transforming Care Conferences Symposia are parallel sessions focussing on a particular and topical theme.

Each Symposium is organized by a Symposium Chair and includes up to four identified paper authors who will present their papers during the session. One or more Discussants will comment on the papers.

Papers must be uploaded by 1st June, details to follow.

2023 Symposia:

1. The political economy of care for children and older adults in times of crisis
2. Breaking boundaries: international accounts from innovative ‘centres of excellence’ in social care
3. Possibilities for care convoys: imaginative and diverse conversations
4. Negotiating care in the context of multiple commitments: Combining paid work and informal care across the life span
5. Socio-economic inequality in long term care and wellbeing: an overview of the findings of the IN-CARE project
6. Young people’s gendered caring: crossing boundaries, shaping futures
7. Blurring the boundaries of care: community-based public policies, social economy and commoning care practices. Insights from the Spanish case
8. Gender Equality and Unpaid Care in the Pandemic: Opportunities for Transformation
9. Crisis of the Later Life Care: Cases from Nordic Welfare States
10. Institutional Boundaries and Wages in Care Employment
11. Transnational families in Europe: caring during the time of ‘crisis’ of the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond

Meet the Author Session

Family Care of Older Persons in Southern Africa: ‘Care Crisis’ or ‘Care in contexts of crises’?
Associate Professor Elena Moore, Department of Sociology, University of Cape Town, South Africa

Convenor: Associate Professor Elena Moore, Department of Sociology, University of Cape Town, South Africa

The context for long term care of older persons across countries in Southern Africa includes many overlapping and reoccuring crises including poverty, HIV-AIDs (and now Covid-19), food insecurity and several natural disasters. Despite the overwhelming contexts of ongoing crises, much of the policy and some scholarly attention has focused attention on the role of families, attempting to talk about a care crisis in terms of the weakening of traditional family support rather than the entrenched structural inequities in care provision. This symposium draws attention to the familialist policies in the region that focus on normative expectations that people are supported by their families and ignore the contexts of crisis in which care takes place. We call for more complex and nuanced understandings of the ways in which families care in contexts of deepening economic, political and health crises where rising acute illness amongst the elderly and post-independent economic and social policies have increased the demands on carers and families.

Convenors:

Dr Rosa Mas Giralt (Deputy Programme Manager BA Professional Studies, Lifelong Learning Centre, Visiting Research Associate, School of Geography, University of Leeds)

Prof Virginie Baby-Collin (Professor of Geography, INSPÉ, member of the joint research unit TELEMMe, University of Aix-Marseille)

Discussant: Dr Erika Kispeter (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine)

Paying heed to the ‘Boundaries, Transitions and Crisis Contexts’ theme of the conference, this symposium will focus on the time of ‘crisis’ of the COVID-19 pandemic and how this has impacted ‘proximate’ and ‘distant’ caring responsibilities between younger, middle and older generations in transnational families in Europe. It will draw from the ongoing interdisciplinary and comparative research project Transnational Families in Europe: Care, Inequalities and Wellbeing taking place in France, Spain, Sweden and the UK. The project has adopted a multi-sited, family-focused, ethnographic and participatory action methodology. Each national team is working with third-sector partner organisations and community peer researchers to collect data from a diverse sample (i.e. different cultural backgrounds and legal statuses) of transnational families with care needs, including family members in countries of origin/other settlement countries (approx. 100 families overall plus 25 in-depth ethnographic family case studies). In addition, interviews with policymakers and practitioners working with migrants in health and social care, education, language learning, voluntary and community sector are also taking place across the four project countries (approx.65). 

The four paper presentations will consider the project’s emerging findings on the reconfiguration of care practices and arrangements in transnational families during, and, in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic in each project country. They will explore the challenges that younger, adult or older migrants or family members faced to continue to provide care locally or cross-borders, access temporary support schemes (e.g. furlough) and health and social services, or secure or maintain the legal status of different family members (e.g. IT or language barriers). Taking account of the boundary factors that mediate care provisions in different (trans)national contexts (i.e. migration regimes/migrants’ social rights) and intersecting inequalities within families (i.e. gender, age, disability, etc.), the symposium will illuminate temporary or more permanent changes in the intergenerational caring responsibilities and mobility strategies of transnational families in Europe in the (post)Covid-19 era.

Paper Authors

UK: Rosa Mas Giralt and Amrita Limbu (University of Leeds); Ruth Evans, Grady Walker, Sally Lloyd-Evans, and Tony Capstick (University of Reading); and James Simpson (Hong Kong University of Science & Technology). 

France: Polina Palash and Virginie Baby-Collin (University of Aix-Marseille). 

Spain: Raquel Martínez Buján, María Paloma Moré Corral, Laura Oso, Andrea Souto García, Laura Suárez Grimalt (University of Coruña, UDC) 

Sweden: Brigitte Suter, Katarina Mozetic (Malmö University). 

Convenors: Franziska Dorn, University of Göttingen, Germany and Nancy Folbre, University of Massachusetts Amherst, US

A growing literature documents a clear “care penalty” on the wages of both women and men employed in care industries and occupations, controlling for individual characteristics. and other factors. Because women are highly concentrated in care jobs, their average earnings are significantly affected.  Other institutional factors also appear relevant, such as national policies, unionization, immigration status, and employment in public sector or a non-profit enterprises relative to for-profit businesses.  

This session will bring together international researchers who are exploring these issues in order to promote greater communication, interaction and collaboration. It includes participants from the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Germany who will consider implications for other countries. Brief presentations will be followed by panel discussion. 

Presentations: 

Torsten Müller, (European Trade Union Institute, Germany) “Trade Union Strategies to Tackle Low Pay in the Care Sector”

Naomi Lightman, University of Calgary, Canada, “Comparing Care Regimes: Worker Characteristics and Wage Penalties in the Global Care Chain” 

Damian Grimshaw (King’s College, London, UK), Mathew Johnson, Eva Herman, Jill Rubery (University of Manchester, UK), “Challenges and Contradictions Implementing a Real Living Wage in the UK Care Sector.”

Hussein, Shereen (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK ) “Employment Inequalities among British Minority Ethnic Workers in Health and Social Care at the time of COVID-19,”

Leila Gautham, (University of Leeds, UK), Kristin Smith (Dartmouth University, US), and Nancy Folbre (University of Massachusetts Amherst, US), “The Cost of Doing Good: The Relative Wages of Human Service Workers in the U.S.” 

Convenor: Alexandra Jønsson, Roskilde University

Despite being internationally known as affluent welfare states with well-functioning health and social services, Nordic countries face a crisis of care. This care-crisis is due to a rising number of elderly citizens in need of care and failure in recruitment in contexts marked by decades of austerity politics. This session explores the various strategies, practices and dilemmas related to the care-crisis. Taking onset in cases from Nordic Welfare States, the panel aims for a broader discussion applicable to various national and cultural settings. Nordic Welfare States, however, serve as a great example, because here governments have launched several strategies intended to re-organize and improve later-life care, focusing on issues such as better conditions for care workers, de-bureaucratization, digitalization of care, and sustainability. The panel investigate empirically the ‘problematizations’ of current conceptions of aging, care, care work and the organization of care embedded in the new policies and strategies, to discuss how the intention to solve the current crisis may constitute new problems and dilemmas: 

(1)“Care Crises: Problems & solutions” uses the case of an intervention to better health and care among and for migrants to discuss the problematization of migratory aging, and the failure to adapt local health intervention solutions to aging migrants. 

(2)“Attractive workplaces – a strategy to curb the recruitment crises” analyses attempts to introduce new care ideals, and reorganize care work that opposes principles of NPM in order to overcome the crisis of recruiting and retaining care workers. 

(3)“Datafication for care in later life?” identify the forms of care that are made to matter in processes of digitalization and data generation and the forms of care that escapes datafication and discuss how such practices relates to dominant notions to what is considered as ‘accountable care’. 

(4) “Sustainability for care in later life?” attends to medicalization and overuse in a sustainability perspective to discuss the drain of scarce care resources and the allocation of professional care for older people in the years to come. 

Presenters: 

Care Crises: Problems & solutions: Associate Professor Anne Leonora Blåkilde & Professor Karen Christensen

Attractive workplaces – a strategy to curb the recruitment crises: PhD candidate Maria Hjortsø Pedersen, Associate Professor Agnete Meldsgaard Hansen & Prof. Annette Kamp

Datafication for care in later life?: PhD candidate Mie Winther Christensen & Professor, Nete Schwennesen

Sustainability of later life care: Associate Professor, Alexandra Brandt Ryborg Jønsson 

Discussant: TBA