Infrastructures of Informal Care: Inequality, Exploitation, Emancipation

Care is fundamental to our individual and collective well-being, 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.

Sukhmani Khorana is a Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow at the Young and Resilient Research Centre, Western Sydney University.

Crawford School of Public Policy

Greg Marston is Professor in the School of Social Science at The University of Queensland, Australia.

Emma Mitchell is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Urban Geographies of Care in the Institute for Culture and Society at the Western Sydney University.

Michelle Peterie is Research Fellow in Sociology at the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies at The University of Sydney.