Reinventing caregiving for the elderly Developing new configurations of care and solidarity in collaborative housing

Lisa Buchter , emlyon business school

The division of care work (childcare, caregiving for aging individuals, etc.) remains one of the major sources of gender and global inequalities today. This is especially true for the caregiving of the elderly, who often to not receive the care they would need, or end up in retirement facilities that outsource care to privatized institutions. Despite caregiver shortage, caregiving is often devalued, and women remain the main informal caregivers. In this article, I examine how members of collaborative houses organize to question, at the collective level, the mechanisms of the unequal divisions of care labor, and propose new forms of collective caregiving arrangments. While scholars have examined how these models may be beneficial for people needing care, few research specifically focused on how these housing arrangements affect the experiences of caregivers, and the transformation of care configurations. Based on two qualitative fieldworks in North America and in Europe (ethnography, participatory research, interviews), I emphasize how enacting different caregiving arrangements, by collectively reflecting on the implicit rules of caregiving and reinventing them, helped prefigure new configurations of care and forms of solidarity that can challenge structural discrimination in the private sphere.

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 Presented in Session P5. Health, Mortality, and Ageing 1