Conceptualising care: critical perspectives on informal care and inequality

Abstract

Informal care occupies a paradoxical place in contemporary societies. It is at once reified as an inherent social good, and minimised, devalued, and pushed to the margins. The current ‘care crisis’ is bringing these tensions into sharp relief, fuelling renewed interest in care and its absences across a wide range of disciplines. In this article, we present an overview of five key literatures for comprehending informal care, with a focus on issues of inequality and injustice. These bodies of scholarship—which, respectively, emphasise the political-economic, affective, policy, geographic, and ecological dimensions of informal care—together furnish a critical conceptualisation of informal care that both recognises care’s social value, and underlines its embeddedness in systems and structures of oppression. Informal care, we show, evades easy definition, requiring a sophisticated array of critical concepts to capture its everyday complexities, avoid reductionism, and ultimately enable individual and collective flourishing.