‘Te lo tienes que currar’: Enacting an Ethics of Care in Times of Austerity

Abstract

Amid austerity policies that have retracted welfare programmes and have affected the livelihood of people in Spain, this paper describes how various local practices of care among members of the PAH (Platform for People Affected by Mortgages) work to recuperate social relations morally and practically. I seek to understand the relationship between people's perceptions of social justice and notions of fairness on the one hand and ideas about deservingness on the other. I am interested in exploring who gets to choose and allocate, and how people in the PAH use the collective notion of care to justify their choice. I analyse the conundrums of a movement that struggles to find a balance between individual judgments and the collective good; I aim to show the dilemmas and contradictions of the struggle for social justice.

The Guardians of the Welfare State: Universal Credit, Welfare Control and the Moral Economy of Frontline Work in Austerity Britain

“…An older ideal of citizenship that sees access to benefits as a matter of ‘social rights’ continues to live on in the daily practices of frontline workers who display a commitment to ‘the public good’ (Bear and Mathur, 2015) and who have started organising in this respect (e.g. Gutierrez-Garza, 2020; Koch, 2016; Public and Commercial Services Union, 2019; Wilde, 2020). Their daily work challenges the idea of a simple roll-out of hegemonic control showing instead the importance of ‘alternative analytical grammars that render visible the potential for resistance that has been largely overlooked in the overly pessimistic narrative of neoliberal governmentality’ (Williams et al, 2014: 2799).…”

Distributed agency: Care, human needs, and distributive struggles in Portugal

“…Early and more recent studies address how caring regimes are deeply entangled in producing and reproducing global and structural inequalities (Nakano Glenn, 2010; Ticktin, 2011). Other studies emphasise how care is mobilised as an instrument of political critique, generating and affecting social change, transformation and hope (Buch, 2013; Gutierrez Garza, 2018, 2020; Han, 2012). This article adopts a processual conceptualisation of care (Thelen, 2015) as distinctively involving the definition, negotiation and valuation of needs, and embedded in more extensive and situated economic and political restructuring processes.…”