Home Care Fault Lines: Understanding Tensions and Creating Alliances
Home care is a window into the complexity of inequality. In this talk, I focus on my recently published book Home Care Fault Lines: Understanding Tensions and Creating Alliances where I argue that, in home care, understanding both tensions and the possibilities for alliances is essential for understanding, and challenging, inequalities. Several studies argue that alliances between home care workers, on the one hand, and elderly or disabled people who receive home care, on the other hand, are key to achieving both quality care services and quality work. Yet, my research shows that we also need to recognize and mediate tensions if alliances are going to be able to tackle structural fault lines reflecting complex inequalities. How can we arrange home care to minimize tensions and maximize alliances? In answer this question by comparing how four government-funded programs in differ in the way they arrange home care. Focusing on the most personal in-home support, that is paid help with daily activities like bathing and eating, my analysis rests on over 300 interviews revealing how a variety of players shape the conditions of home care service and work in unique contexts. This talk will compare for-profit and non-profit home care, revealing the limits of flexibility under marketization and charting the possibilities for alternatives.
Bio:
University of Toronto Professor Cynthia Cranford
University of Toronto Professor Cynthia Cranford
Cynthia Cranford is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Dr. Cranford studies inequalities of gender, work and migration, and collective efforts to resist them. Her most recent research project is a comparative study of home care showcased in Home Care Fault Lines: Understanding Tensions and Creating Alliances published in 2020 by Cornell University’s ILR Press. She is also the co-author of Self-employed Workers Organize: Law, Policy and Unions published by McGill-Queens University Press (2005). Her work has been published in several journals including Critical Sociology, Gender & Society, Gender, Work and Organisation, Just Labour, Social Problems, Work, Employment and Society, and in several edited volumes.
