This summer I attended and presented at the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) Annual Meeting in Montreal, Canada. My trans-Atlantic journey was funded by the UK-based Centre for Care, where I research the paid care workforce. I belong to the British Sociological Association (BSA), and regularly participate in its annual conference, but the ASA event enabled me to learn from the work of emerging and established North American scholars. A large conference – itself a context for care – presents abundant opportunities to hear about, and discuss, a range of ideas, and to be exposed to new concepts and perspectives. The ASA conference featured a number of thoughtful papers about care that drew attention to its changing and context-dependent nature. The papers highlighted situations where new care needs and dynamics emerge, and confronted questions about how these interact with existing social and public infrastructure, cultural norms and expectations, and specific characteristics of care regimes.

I will highlight concepts that were new to me and brought home the importance of social context. Raquel Delerme used the term “carceral care economy” when referring to the caregiving of Black and Latina  mothers with incarcerated adult children in the U.S. Delerme’s presentation emphasized the costs of caring that the “neoliberal carceral state” imposes on families. The harshness of penal systems clearly violates humane principles of concern for others. Alejandro Márquez also focused on a situation where people face multiple vulnerabilities and risks—crossings of the U.S.-Mexico border. By recognizing the caregiving work being done in this context by workers in the immigrant rights movement Márquez expands understandings of who gets counted as a care worker.  

Contexts that seem to represent the diametrical opposite of care bring to mind the insights of two scholars not present at the conference. Canada-based Fiona Robinson builds on the important care ethics literature, contending that “neo-liberalism is explicitly anti-care, since it views the giving and receiving of care a sign of failure, dependence or deviance.” Ireland-based Kathleen Lynch’s work emphasizes the potential force of care as a force for social change in contemporary neoliberal capitalism.

At the ASA session on the “Public Life of Care,” Pat Armstrong described “promising practices” for improvements in care quality, explaining why “best practices” are often out of reach. In previous collaborative work, Armstrong identifies promising practices for leadership in long-term care settings, including possibilities for shared learning across different care environments. Her ASA presentation referred to “unpaid worries,” a term that captures the intensity, gravity, and stress of inadequately recognized care management.

In the same session, Madonna Harrington Meyer  explained how the care that grandmothers provide for grandchildren with disabilities is both a barrier to and a contribution to civic engagement. She called for greater recognition of this work and more generous federal policies to support families and strengthen the social fabric.

Communications media clearly shape social norms and expectations. Lauren Danielowski and Asmita Aasaavari’s paper explored American print media representations of the care economy and the right to care in the US. Their discourse analysis of content from the 1980s to the present day drew on evidence related to a range of workers across the care economy, pointing to representations that tended to heteronormative, moralistic, and oblivious to the perspectives of care workers themselves.

As care scholars, part of our role is to continually identify where care is and isn’t. We should strive to critically examine how this relates to, shapes, and is embedded within complex inequalities. I appreciated the depth of engagement on these issues at the conference. I especially valued their foregrounding of everyday realities that too often remain invisible.

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Artwork by Nancy Folbre
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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