Award Title: WHO CARES? REBUILDING CARE IN A POST-PANDEMIC WORLD
Funder: Economic and Social Research Council

Abstract: The pandemic highlighted the centrality of care. COVID-19 heightened awareness of the myriad forms of social connections in care as essential work crucial to the functioning of society. Care work has never been so visible, yet so precarious and vulnerable. Abundant evidence reveals the disproportionately negative consequences of COVID-19 on women, particularly women of color, migrants, and refugees, both as essential care workers and as recipients of care.

The pandemic also revealed the limitations of care systems, exacerbating the care crisis worldwide with a greater impact in vulnerable territories. The project seeks to uncover and understand the matrix of care provision that is fragmented and uncoordinated, and the resultant overlapping, inconsistent and at times competing polices and regulations shaping care work and its provision at different levels of governance. Rebuilding a robust and more resilient care organization requires a comprehensive understanding of the care economy and entails learning from innovative initiatives in different countries.

Our transnational team, extending previous comparative research networks, will bring together experts on care studies to analyze six countries with differing welfare regimes, level of inequalities, social organization of care, and health systems in Brazil, Canada, Colombia, France, United Kingdom and United States. We can gain a better understanding of vulnerabilities and capacities for responding to care crises from cross-national comparative research.

Comparisons will proceed along four main axes:
(i) the impact of the pandemic on needs and modalities of care provision: surveying alternative methodologies to harmonize data in a transnational perspective.
(ii) labor conditions and rights in a post pandemic world: transnational analysis of/with paid care workers.
(iii) care as a strategic dimension and pillar for public policies on social infrastructure rebuilding: comparing national experiments.
(iv) caring strategies when the state fails: qualitative analysis of care provision on vulnerable communities.

Lay Abstract: The pandemic has highlighted the centrality of care as a necessary service performed by care workers that affects everyone. Our proposal will analyze how this focus on care has affected the practices of both care providers and care recipients, and how it has influenced social policies. Broadening our focus through international comparisons reveals how the Covid experience provides lessons in the medium and long-term. 

Comparisons will proceed along four main axes, comprising different dimensions and approaches, reflecting the interdisciplinary team profile:
(i) The impact of the pandemic on needs and modalities of care provision: surveying alternative methodologies to harmonize data in a transnational perspective.
(ii) Labor conditions and rights in a post pandemic world: transnational analysis of/with paid care workers.
(iii) Care as a strategic dimension and pillar for public policies on social infrastructure rebuilding: comparing national and urban experiments.
(iv) Caring strategies when the state fails: qualitative analysis of care provision on vulnerable communities.

Defining axes is a way to intersect and integrate the research agendas from the different national teams, taking advantage of their competences to achieve an organized cross- fertilization of ideas and methods. Our selection of countries and teams will achieve two main goals. First, Brazil, Colombia, Canada, France, UK and the US provide enough variation in societal characteristics crucial to understanding the different configurations of care across national governance, welfare regime, health-care system institutionalization and jurisdiction over health policy, care employment, working conditions of care workers, level of labor market informality, home health-care policies, and Covid-19 pandemic policies. Second, the principal researchers of each national team have national and comparative care expertise and previous experience in collaborative research. The project leverages the local relevance of the foci from different axes as a strength of the research design. While each country team takes responsibility for an in-depth analysis of one main axis, our cross-cutting research strategy uncovers the mechanisms that reveals significant differences in the observed situations

Research Activity Codes: 8.1 ORGANISATION AND DELIVERY OF SERVICES;8.3 POLICY, ETHICS AND RESEARCH GOVERNANCE
Health Categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE;INFECTION