Tanja Carstensen and Almut Peukert, University of Hamburg
Conditions for care work at home – the everyday formal, semi-formal and informal practices by which support is provided within the household for children, elderly, partners, and oneself in order to maintaining livelihood – have changed fundamentally in recent years. Reasons among others are increased women’s employment rates, deliminiation of ‘paid work’ and ‘life’, work intensification, higher mobility, new gender arrangements, and the higher need to elderly care. These transformations have a clear temporal dimension, they are connected with the organization and perception of time within families closely: Time pressure has become a key issue in the everyday life of balancing between paid work and the demands caused by childcare, elder care, care for partners and oneself. In the proposed session, we seek to analyze the question how time for care around and within the home is negotiated within different (gendered) familial arrangements and invite contributions addressing this question from intersectional perspectives, different levels (micro, meso, macro), different stages of life (childcare, care for disabled, elder care) as well as different strategies and their effects (politics, organizational or individual level). This may include, for example, the analysis of workplace arrangements, digital offers (platforms, apps), policy developments (e.g. care policies, social investment), as well as familial negotiations and strategies from intersectional perspectives connected to care provision within domestic settings. Potential questions are: (How) is the problem of time pressure framed by different actors? Who is addressed, who is excluded? What kind of transformations can be observed? Which strategies, measures, practices can be identified? What is their time frame? How is time pressure managed, which strategies are chosen and how are they legitimized? Which viable and organizational strategies offer opportunities and are used to cope with the time pressure?