Infrastructures of Informal Care
Inequality, Exploitation, Emancipation
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Bristol University Press
Publishing:30th Jun '26
£85.00
This title is due to be published on 30th June, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Care is fundamental to our individual and collective wellbeing, but it is also deeply implicated in historical and present-day injustices.
Taking seriously the darker potentialities of care as a relation of exploitation and domination, this edited collection interrogates the social and governance infrastructures that variously shape, expropriate, necessitate and unravel care at the ‘private’ interpersonal level.
Combining rich empirical analysis and theoretical rigour, the chapters reveal:
• entrenched inequalities in informal care responsibilities and the resources needed to undertake them;
• the intimate relationship between care, exploitation and expropriation, including their frequent embeddedness in colonial power structures; and
• the urgency of reforming, resourcing and valuing informal care at the infrastructural level.
Invaluable reading for scholars and students of health and social care and social policy, this book offers a critical framework for reimagining care in the service of more just and equitable societies.
“At a time when hostility and contempt have come to play a prominent role in political life, this volume offers a timely intervention. The editors and contributors argue that care – both as a practice and as a value embedded in institutions – is a vital condition for the functioning of societies. With intellectual precision and moral clarity, they show how practices and institutions shaped by histories of coloniality and exclusion can be reimagined as a transformative and just foundation for collective life in the 21st century.” Barbara Prainsack, University of Vienna
“Infrastructures of Informal Care brings together a range of incisive analysis that reveals the various ways contemporary underlying structures and resources shape, extend, deepen and constrain informal relations of care. The collected volume importantly offers a range of examples, drawing out the significance of social infrastructures that are relational and socio-technical, distilling the depth, complexity and renewal of informal care relations that sustain our social worlds across time.” Karen Soldatic, Toronto Metropolitan University
ISBN: 9781447372981
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
304 pages