The New Politics of Home: Housing, Gender and Care in Times of Crisis 9781447351856

Table of contents :
Front Cover
The New Politics of Home
Copyright information
Table of contents
Notes on the authors
Acknowledgments
One Introduction: the new politics of home
Austerity and neoliberalism
The home
Care and caring
Care at home
Introducing the rest of the book
Two Home economics: home and care in neoliberal policy
Introduction
Home, care and gender in contemporary policy
Questions of home in policy discourse
Active citizens
Untapped potential
The unsettled ground of home and care
Conclusions
Three Caring in domestic spaces: inequalities and housing
Introduction
Inequalities of care and caring in domestic spaces
Housing, home and care relationships
Housing as an asset in time-space
Domestic care and the built form of housing
Care, ‘home’ and identity
Housing pathways and networks of support
Conclusion
Four Relational biographies in times of austerity: family, home and care
Introduction
Lifecourses, linked lives and relational biographies: an interdisciplinary conversation
Developing tools: biography and ethnography
Findings on relational biographies and linked lives: family, home and care in austerity
Kerry
Zoe
Selma
Concluding reflections
Five Spaces of care beyond the home: austerity and children’s services
Introduction
The welfare state, care and austerity
Researching shifting geographies of home, care and Sure Start Children’s Centres
Closeness and distance from the home space
Friendship, inclusion and belonging
An existential crisis of care?
Conclusions
Six Conclusion: opening up the politics of the home
Seeing and sensing the politics of the home
Matters of welfare, politics and citizenship
Notes
References
Index
Back Cover

Citation preview

ELEANOR JUPP, SOPHIE BOWLBY, JANE FRANKLIN AND SARAH MARIE HALL

THE NEW POLITICS OF HOME Housing, gender and care in times of crisis

POLICY PRESS

RESEARCH

ELEANOR JUPP SOPHIE BOWLBY JANE FRANKLIN SARAH MARIE HALL

THE NEW POLITICS OF HOME Housing, gender and care in times of crisis

POLICY PRESS

RESEARCH

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Policy Press University of Bristol 1-9 Old Park Hill Bristol BS2 8BB UK t: +44 (0)117 954 5940 [email protected] www.policypress.co.uk

North America office: Policy Press c/o The University of Chicago Press 1427 East 60th Street Chicago, IL 60637, USA t: +1 773 702 7700 f: +1 773 702 9756 [email protected] www.press.uchicago.edu

© Policy Press 2019 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested. ISBN 978-1-4473-5184-9 ISBN 978-1-4473-5186-3 ISBN 978-1-4473-5187-0 ISBN 978-1-4473-5185-6

(hardback) (ePub) (Mobi) (OA PDF)

The right of Eleanor Jupp, Sophie Bowlby, Jane Franklin and Sarah Marie Hall to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Policy Press. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the authors and not of the University of Bristol or Policy Press. The University of Bristol and Policy Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Policy Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design by Policy Press Front cover: image kindly supplied by Alamy Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Policy Press uses environmentally responsible print partners

Contents

Notes on the authors

iv

Acknowledgements

v

one

Introduction: the new politics of home Eleanor Jupp, Sophie Bowlby, Jane Franklin and Sarah Marie Hall

1

two

Home economics: home and care in neoliberal policy Jane Franklin

13

three

Caring in domestic spaces: inequalities and housing Sophie Bowlby

39

four

Relational biographies in times of austerity: family, home and care Sarah Marie Hall

63

five

Spaces of care beyond the home: austerity and children’s services Eleanor Jupp

87

six

Conclusion: opening up the politics of the home Eleanor Jupp, Sophie Bowlby, Jane Franklin and Sarah Marie Hall

107

Notes

115

References

117

Index

141

iii

Notes on the authors

Eleanor Jupp is Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at the University of Kent. Her research combines human geography and social policy concerns, with particular interests in policy interventions in disadvantaged neighbourhoods, and questions of community, care and emotions. Sophie Bowlby is a feminist social geographer whose research focuses on access, care, friendship and experiences of bereavement. While retired, she continues research as a Visiting Fellow at Reading University and a Visiting Professor at Loughborough University. Jane Franklin is a political sociologist with an interest in feminism, social theory and politics. She has worked in academic and policy settings and is currently writing a book on women, politics and home. Sarah Marie Hall is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Manchester. Working across feminist, social and economic geography, she explores in her research how lived experience and social difference shape socio-​economic inequalities.

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newgenprepdf

Acknowledgements

This book springs partly from a seminar series held at the Open University between 2013 and 2015, entitled ‘Home Space: Public and Private in New Welfare Settings’, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC Grant no. ES/​J022403/​1V). Thanks are due to others involved with the seminar, especially Janet Newman, who helped greatly in developing the themes at the centre of this book. Thanks are also due to Sheila Peace, Alison Clark and others who participated in the seminars. Many thanks also to all at Policy Press who worked on the editorial and production stages of the book. Eleanor:  I am very grateful to my husband Rowan, and parents Tom and Cressida, for lots of extra childcare while I worked on this book. Part of its purpose is to draw attention to the importance of care and domestic labour as the work that makes all other work possible. Their labour made this book possible for me. Sophie: I would like to thank Linda McKie for helpful ideas on intersectionality and care and my coauthors and Peter Pearson for broader critical comments on my chapter. Sarah: I would like to thank all the research participants for their time and generosity, and the University of Manchester for funding my research via a Hallsworth Research Fellowship. Jane: I would like to thank my daughter Sarah.

v

ONE Introduction: the new politics of home Eleanor Jupp, Sophie Bowlby, Jane Franklin and Sarah Marie Hall

This book sets out to give an account of home and care, gender and housing, at a time of ‘crisis’. We understand ‘crisis’ in this context as multifaceted and various (see Walby 2015), encompassing austerity cuts to welfare services, the resulting loss of community and public infrastructure, worsening inequality, loss of benefits and income and the wider loss of social infrastructure which comes with a neoliberal settlement (Pearson and Elson 2015). Is labelling such conditions ‘crises’ helpful? Within everyday discussions we tend to think of political and economic crises as dramatic and visible, and as taking place in the public sphere, while we might consider personal crises to be individual and subjective, and associated with trauma and poor mental health. Yet this book focuses on crises which play out in the interstices of public policy, economics and politics on the one hand, and in personal life, relationships and senses of self on the other (see Pain 2010). This requires thinking across the boundaries between public and private lives, long critiqued by feminist scholars (see Davidoff and Hall 1987), as well as considering what kinds of experiences and subjectivities are visible or invisible within political and economic debates.

1

The New Politics of Home

This book is concerned with questions of home and care, the scenes of many of our most intimate and everyday experiences. A crisis in this terrain might involve realising that paid work shifts do not match childcare; or experiencing the closure of a Children’s Centre that gave a rhythm to a long day of caring for a baby; or losing a benefit which enabled a relative to access respite care. As these examples show, such crises are, to borrow a phrase from a Chapter Four, ‘knotted within’ everyday practices, relationships and subjectivities. In experiencing or witnessing them, either as an individual or as a researcher, it may be hard, first, to make them ‘visible’ at all, and second, to connect them to wider political and economic changes. It is one of the purposes of this book to provide conceptual, empirical and methodological resources to render visible the political and economic stakes of matters of home and care at the current time. In the rest of this introductory chapter, we first sketch out some of the key concepts which form the backdrop to subsequent chapters, namely questions of austerity and neoliberalism, and of home and care. Gender, and more specifically the everyday lives of women, is threaded through these discussions as a key aspect of this terrain. We then turn to introduce the contributions of the subsequent chapters more specifically. Austerity and neoliberalism Of course, within recent discussions of economics and politics, ‘crisis’ has also had a more specific and particular meaning, pointing to the banking and financial crisis of 2008, which over 10 years later, continues to cast a shadow of both financial precarity and an ongoing path of cuts to public sector spending (Taylor-​Gooby 2016). Clearly the financial crisis and resultant austerity have material and economic impacts on the population. More recently research attention has also been given to the impacts of austerity on less tangible resources: on mood and

2

Introduction

anxiety (see Hitchen 2016; Horton 2016), especially about the future. Horton (2016) argues that austerity and its shaping of ‘the current climate’ reset the ‘feeling rules’ about what it is possible to imagine and demand, in his case in relation to public sector provision for young people. He draws on Anderson’s (2010) conceptualisation of ‘anticipatory anxieties’, part of the affective repertoire of neoliberal capitalism more broadly. However, there remains little empirical research which grounds such changed moods and feelings within the everyday spaces of home life and caring practices (although see Hall 2018a and Stenning 2018). Focusing on such spaces also clearly involves moving into a gendered sphere. It will be apparent from the examples already discussed, around childcare, services and benefits, that crises of home and care are often gendered, differently experienced by men and women. Women still take much of the practical and emotional responsibility for care and for the less visible aspects of managing homes and households (Crompton and Lyonette 2008; Razavi and Staab 2010; Lyonette and Crompton 2015; Razavi 2016). Research by the Women’s Budget Group has shown how women in particular are impacted financially by austerity (Hall et  al 2017), but also that they may shoulder more of the emotional and material work of coping with fewer resources and services, both in the here and now and in terms of planning for the future (Fawcett Society 2012; Hall 2016). Indeed, as argued in Chapter Two, while austerity may be increasing the pressures on many women’s everyday lives, especially in relation to care, such pressures can be seen as part of a longer trajectory of pressures wrought by neoliberalism more generally. While the need for care is an unavoidable part of human experience (as discussed further below), it is often visible within neoliberal capitalism only to the extent that it poses problems that need to be ‘fixed’ in order for the economy to run smoothly (Fraser 2016). As Franklin argues in Chapter Two, part of this ‘fix’ means giving attention to the home space, which becomes a kind of ‘black box’ from which care and

3

The New Politics of Home

resources may be extracted, yet never fully engaged with either politically or economically. In order to develop this analysis, in this book we draw on interdisciplinary approaches from human geography, social policy, feminist studies and political theory. Our starting point is that both home and care reside at the intersections of shifting social policy, economic and political contexts, and personal lives, relationships and changing experiences over the lifecourse (Barnes 2012; Blunt 2005; Mallett 2004). As explicated further below, in approaching the ‘home’, we argue for attention to the wider cultural, material, emotional and symbolic importance and meanings of home, which are rarely discussed explicitly within policy ( Jacobson 2010; Brickell 2012;). ‘Care’ is also understood as encompassing many aspects of everyday practices, forms of emotional and material labour, and relationships (Bowlby 2012a). These two spheres, and the links between them, are further discussed below. The home In this book we focus on the wider links between housing and notions of home. The word ‘home’ arouses strong attachments, multiple associations and everyday experiences. The idea of home can evoke family and intimate relationships; it can be a place of creativity, terror, loneliness, love, pleasure, warmth, overcrowding, inequality, desperation and plenty. Home can be a country or a building –​a place far away, a house, a flat, a bedsit, a hotel room or a shop doorway. We can also think of loved ones as home or of coming home to ourselves. Homes are repositories of meaning and material things in the way they are organised and decorated, and in how objects are collected and placed. In approaching the politics of home, as we explore in this book, it has become almost an accepted paradigm to talk about home as ‘ambivalent’ or complex (Blunt 2005; Varley

4

Introduction

2008). This ambivalence often refers to both the importance of home (however it is understood) as an emotional resource in the most personal aspects of our lives (Young 2005), and the recognition of its central role within oppressive relations of power, especially in terms of gender but also on other axes of inclusion and exclusion. With this book we move away from the notion that the politics of home should either involve critique or some kind of normative embrace. Instead we propose a focus on home both as a material site of everyday lives and as a way of opening up a set of issues at the intersections of subjectivities and lived experiences and of wider circuits and regimes of power. Our approaches therefore draw on a burgeoning interest in the home from human geographers (Mallett 2004; Varley 2008; Brickell 2012), which is only just starting to be brought into dialogue with questions of policy and politics (see Brickell et al 2017; Nowicki 2018). As well as paying attention to geography, we are also particularly concerned with approaching home through critical feminist lenses. As already noted, debates about the binary of ‘public’ and ‘private’ have been central to particular forms of feminist analysis (Young 2005). These forms of analysis were highly influential in rendering what had been regarded as private and personal matters of domestic life, care and relationships as ‘public’ matters and, as such, the objects of social policy provision. However, as this book considers, the gains made by feminist policy academics and activists in past decades are those that may now be reversed and undermined by the rise of austerity politics in many national contexts (Karamessini and Rubery 2013), buttressed by an ideological climate that is largely hostile to feminism. This calls for a reinvigorated feminist analytic. One way is through a reassertion of a feminist political economy that highlights new materialities and imaginaries of home within shifting political and economic contexts and social policy discourses (LeBaron 2010; Hoppania and Vaittien 2015; Werner

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The New Politics of Home

et al 2017). As already noted, these include the consequences of austerity and cuts to benefits and services in the UK and Europe, as well as rising poverty, new forms of commodified care and domestic work (Levitas 2012; Wiggan 2012) and new forms of inequality in access to housing (see Chapter Three). Empirically such research must engage with the ongoing (and increasing) importance of the domestic sphere if we are to ‘find’ women’ (Vaiou 2013) and their everyday experiences –​for ‘care’, which forms another key focus of this book, may be even less visible, even more behind closed doors than matters of housing. Care and caring There are a number of important strands in research on policies and practices of ‘care’. First, the feminist analysis of care practices initiated by the seminal papers of Gilligan (1982) and Noddings (1986), which argued for a revaluation of the activities of care which are so often the province of women. Secondly, the ‘ethics of care’ strand, itself flowing from and contributing to feminist analyses, initiated by Tronto (1993) and developed by Held (1995; 2007), Sevenhuijsen (1998) and Groenhout (2004) among many others. This tried to identify the characteristics of ‘good care’ and argued for an ethics that prioritised these ways of relating to others and for such values to inform government policies (Sevenhuijsen 1998, 2003; Tronto 2010). Thirdly, the vital contribution of disability scholars and activists (e.g., Oliver 1990; Morris 1993a, 1993b; Thomas 1997; Shakespeare 2000), which demonstrated the negative and disabling aspects of many care practices and policies, and argued for the idea of ‘assistance’ or ‘help’ rather than ‘care’ as a guiding principle for facilitating the full participation of disabled people in social and political life (Watson et al 2004; Hughes et al 2005). Since these early contributions, there has been a very rapid growth of empirical and theoretical research and debates on practices of care and ethics of care.

6

Introduction

In particular, many studies of practices of care concern themselves with what Sayer (2005) has dubbed ‘lay normativities’ –​ that is, the everyday moral reasoning used by carers and those cared for to direct their activities. Study of these lay normativities is central to many of the arguments of those who are concerned with identifying ‘good care’. Thus many studies have shown that ideas of morality and ‘proper’ behaviour are central to caring both as it is actually practised and as it might ideally be practised and/​or regulated. Not only are care relationships imbued with notions of morality; they are often  –​perhaps always  –​relationships of unequal power. In part, this inequality stems from the micro-​ level social relationships between carers and cared-​for people and the influence of social discourses about moral obligations to care and ways of caring on such relationships. Here a vital element is the social meaning of ‘dependency’. As Fraser and Gordon (2002) have argued, a negative view of dependency is historically specific and, as many of those researching care have argued, interdependency is an inevitable part of being human. However, the ways in which care practices are socially valued, understandings of what constitutes care and by whom and how it should be done, are culturally produced and culturally variable, as is the recognition of both one’s own and others’ care entitlements. In sum, care is complex, necessarily socially contested, culturally variable over time and space, and imbued with power relations. Practices of care cannot be straightforwardly read as morally positive but nevertheless are vital to human survival and central to ideas of morality. Care practices and beliefs produce social inequalities, but social inequalities external to care are also incorporated into care practices and beliefs. Hence, the power relations expressed and (re)created in caring relationships are complex and multifaceted, and addressing the exploitation of either carers or cared-​for people will always involve changing social relationships external to care practices as well as those within them.

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The New Politics of Home

Care at home Giving or receiving care within ‘domestic space’ is part of most people’s taken-​for-​granted everyday life. As has already been made clear, it is also an activity moulded by economic, social, cultural and material environments beyond this space. We might consider four broad types of care and caring in domestic space: self-​care, informal care, paid-​for care and volunteer care. Self-​care involves the ability to care for one’s immediate, everyday bodily needs and is a taken-​for-​granted but vital part of many people’s lives. This can include money for shopping for everyday needs (food, warmth, adequate clothing) and for paying rent. Some people need help with some or all aspects of self-​care. The experience of self-​care is dependent on the nature of our social relationships with others, and the material contexts in which people live (Ward 2015). While the ability to self-​care is valued by most people, a moralised discourse of ‘obligatory’ and wide-​ ranging self-​care is also often promoted as a means of reducing the caring responsibilities of the state (also see Hall 2016). Informal care is exchanged between family and friends who live within a particular household or who live outside that household but who care for someone within it (e.g., someone helping a sick friend or a sick relative by doing their shopping or listening to their worries). Paid-​for care involves the care worker as employed directly by the person cared for or employed by a private, state-​ run or not-​for-​profit agency. Volunteer care means that the carer is unwaged but has volunteered for a formally organised third-​sector organisation to provide care. Each type of care-​ giving involves different economic and social relationships and expectations and different types of power relationships (Thomas 1993), but may involve similar tasks and caring for similar types of people –​for example, caring for a child, an adult, an elderly person, a relative or a friend. Caring for these diverse types of people may involve emotional care, often some form of physical care, and may involve organising other people to deliver care.

8

Introduction

As already noted, there are strong cultural expectations about domestic care-​giving that are linked to ideas about ‘family’ and ‘home’ –​expectations about who should care, how they should care, and when and where they should care. These expectations concern the gender, age and ethnicity of carers and the cared-​for person and the kin or friend relationships between them (Nelson 2011); in particular, women are seen both as obliged to care and as ‘natural’ carers in many cultures. Such expectations may be felt as strong social and ethical obligations which are difficult to modify or may be more mutable and negotiated (Finch and Groves 1983), but they expose both the carer and the cared-​ for person to potential emotional manipulation. While these expectations may be most obviously felt by informal carers, they can also be at work in relationships between paid-​for or volunteer carers and those who are cared for. For example, they may lead to paid carers feeling obliged to work more than the hours they are paid for or to laying a burden of gratitude upon the person they care for (Bowlby 2012a). In sum, the relationships involved in caring can often be emotionally messy, complex and difficult. Care employment is notoriously underpaid and the skills involved are widely undervalued –​a situation partly ascribed to the weak labour market position of many of those in such work. Thus, it is recent immigrants, people from negatively racialised groups and women lacking many formal qualifications who are overrepresented among those providing paid domiciliary care (Murphy and Turner 2017). Glucksmann’s ‘total social organisation of labour’ theory and her study with Lyon (Lyon and Glucksmann 2008) of social care in the Netherlands, Italy, Sweden and the UK show, both theoretically and empirically, the interdependencies between informal and formal care (paid or voluntary). These studies show how ‘the presence or absence of informal care influences the level and type of formal care work’ (Murphy and Turner 2017). Decisions as to whether and how to provide informal care are not simply individual

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The New Politics of Home

choices but influence and are influenced by broader social policy and employment policy. Thus, recent cutbacks in welfare expenditures in many European countries have led to an increase in informal care (Ranci and Pavolini 2015). Introducing the rest of the book Within this overall set of themes –​of neoliberalism, austerity and crisis, gender, home and care –​a number of (interrelated) arguments are developed in the rest of the book. Subsequent chapters provide theoretical, conceptual and methodological resources to advance a new politics of home from different perspectives. The first two chapters draw together a wealth of relevant literature to stimulate new ways of thinking about home, housing and care, providing new route maps for further research. Chapter Two by Franklin proceeds primarily through a politics of critique and deconstruction, which she calls a feminist genealogy. She discusses how the evocation of ‘home’ in policy discourses serves to mask the neoliberal economic and political shifts discussed above, through an analysis of a recent social care policy document. In particular, she draws attention to a ‘soft maternal’ language of intimacy and care, creating compatibility between government and personal preferences, and shaping a social world that is compatible with economic interests (Simon-​ Kumar 2011; Pykett 2012; Newman 2013; Prǖgl 2015). It is argued here that, through this use of feminised language, home is strategically placed in social policy discourse as the ideal space of care, familiarity and personal choice. What are glossed over in such discourses, therefore, are the vast inequalities in relation to access to secure housing and home lives, and the loss of a wider network of services which support forms of care at home (Needham 2014). It is such inequalities which are at the centre of Chapter Three by Bowlby, which provides a new framework for examining how housing and home produce inequality in relation to care

10

Introduction

resources and practices. The chapter sets out an intersectional approach to understanding care inequalities, bringing home into view in new ways when considering what is at stake in a range of social policy areas. The framework includes home and housing as an economic asset, as material and built form, as a source of individual identity and security, and as part of wider networks of support and relationships. All these aspects of home have a direct impact on capacities for, and experiences of, care. At the centre of these intersecting pressures are often the everyday lives of women (MacLeavy 2011), especially at particular points in the lifecourse, and therefore shaping ‘new relational biographies’ (Heaphy et al 2013) of care. Chapter Four by Hall primarily considers methodological issues in relation to the politics of home and care. The chapter explores how to access biographies of home and care, drawing on findings in the form of ethnographic accounts and vignettes from recent research with families and communities in Greater Manchester, in the UK, regarding everyday life in austerity, and in particular using findings from a ‘biographical mapping tool’. The use of such a tool illuminates the ways in which austerity is couched within everyday family and home life, that it does not sit aside from personal matters but becomes kneaded into and knotted within, and that practical and conceptual tools are needed in order to thoroughly explore and explain this complexity. Drawing on both ethnographic and interview data, Chapter Five by Jupp is a primarily empirical chapter which seeks to look beyond the home space itself to explore Sure Start Children’s Centres as crucial ‘in-​between’ or ‘home-​like’ spaces, linking care at home with wider networks and resources. These centres are increasingly being closed as a result of austerity cuts, and the chapter illuminates what is at stake in these closures, exploring how the centres navigated links between home space, the welfare state and everyday caring practices. The final chapter draws together the arguments of preceding chapters to discuss the implications of such a focus on home

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The New Politics of Home

and care for research, politics, and welfare and policy design. In particular the chapter considers what forms of citizenship and political agency might emerge at a moment of austerity, connecting personal and intimate lives to political and economic change.

12

TWO Home economics: home and care in neoliberal policy Jane Franklin

Introduction As discussed in the previous chapter, women do the majority of care work, and home is the place where much of this work is done. In this chapter, I explore how the home and the caring work that women do are taken for granted in UK social policy today. It is a feminist enquiry into how home is framed in policy language to make intimate and personal resources economically available for the informal delivery of social care. ‘Home’ is a small word with universal resonance, with as many meanings as there are individuals. The word ‘home’ evokes intimate relationships and personal life. It is the space of belonging and belongings, usually but not necessarily located in concrete living spaces. Home signifies the emotional in relation to the physical, the private in relation to the public, the social in relation to the economic, and informal in relation to formal care. In contemporary politics and policy-​making ‘home’ is pared down to its economic utility, to extract resources that are useful to governments who are committed to transferring

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The New Politics of Home

responsibility for care from the state to communities and individuals. While there is a growing sense in public discourse that people prefer to be cared for at home, there is not the same level of debate as to who will be at home to care and what kinds of homes are appropriate  –​questions that raise issues of social and economic inequalities (Martin-​Matthews 2007). Home carries the weight of women’s day-​to-​day lives and is the ground of feminist politics. If home, and by implication women’s unpaid and low-​paid labour, is categorised as a useful economic resource, the intimate and political qualities of home fade into the background. Overall, the chapter questions how women’s caring and domestic work is politically arranged to maximise economic utility. It analyses how home is evoked and shaped in policy language, how the core policy problem is defined and how economic subjects and material resources are named and captured. The enquiry is guided by feminist genealogy which, as Nikolas Rose points out, ‘is not a methodology, but a means of distancing oneself from certain conceptual tools which have a powerful hold over critical thought’ (Rose 2017: 33). Genealogy offers a theoretical means of tracking how a small word like ‘home’ can be politically strategic, what it signifies (Bell 1999; Pillow 2003; Jenkins 2011) and how it is a cipher for women’s work and resources. It is also a means of questioning and unravelling how policy problems are framed and their solutions constituted (Bacchi 1999; Fischer 2003; Coole 2009). One example of genealogy is Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon’s ‘A genealogy of dependency: tracing a keyword of the U.S. welfare state’ (Fraser and Gordon 1994), where they identify how welfare dependency is constructed as a policy problem to be solved in western welfare states, and how dependency has historically been deemed characteristic of certain subjects including slaves, servants and women. Their argument is that dependency has been constructed as a label to value and categorise persons and to prioritise welfare spending. Home has a similar history in the

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Home economics

constitution of welfare states, not least as the private sphere, the realm of personal and family relationships, and the place where dependency is conceptually situated. The genealogy draws on feminist scholarship to trace a history of how the home emerges in neoliberal policy discourse as a cipher for women’s work and material resources. Feminism, Anne Phillips argues, is primarily political, concerned with the identification and transformation of gender relations (Phillips 1998). Across the many feminist perspectives in academic and political activity there are ‘three common starting points: that mainstream definitions are saturated with gender; that this saturation has worked in such a way as to legitimate women’s lack of political power; and that much of the process of mainstream politics depends on a particular way of conceiving the public–​private divide’ (Phillips 1998:  6). Drawing on feminist analyses of neoliberalism across theory, politics, economics and policy critique, there follows an outline of how the terms of contemporary debates about home and social care are ideologically constituted. ‘Home’ occupies an ambiguous position within feminist scholarship and neoliberal policy discourses and the two are entangled in unexpected ways (Fraser 2009), as I go on to discuss. In the context of this history, the second section of the chapter identifies and questions certain key words in policy language that express women’s labour and home resources (Williams 1976; Fraser and Gordon 1994). Neoliberalism is a ‘language politics’ (Hall 2012), and it is in the words and phrases used to describe and shape policy that ideology or discourse is transmitted (Béland 2011). The text chosen for this analysis is A Vision for Adult Social Care: Capable Communities and Active Citizens (Department of Health 2010), published at the end of the New Labour government and the beginning of the Coalition government (2010–​2015). At this pivotal moment, ‘home’ enters policy discourse in new ways, with a marked conceptual shift in perspective from state/​community

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The New Politics of Home

to personal responsibility for social care. The key words and phrases that evoke women’s work, home resources and the policy problem are ‘active citizens’, ‘untapped potential’ and ‘dependency’. The purpose of this analysis is to disrupt the surface meaning of these words, and to articulate the power relationships and economic assumptions that they capture and express. Feminists have argued that gender is written into neoliberal discourse in new ways, requiring a different kind of critique ( Jenkins 2011; Simon-​Kumar 2011). In the final section of this chapter I explore what this might entail. Home, care and gender in contemporary policy To unravel the language politics that steers ‘home’ to the centre of social care policy, this section traces how neoliberal policy-​makers reoriented the society–​economy dynamic that framed the postwar welfare state to align the social world to free market economic interests. During the 1990s New Labour policy-​makers drew on communitarian and feminist perspectives of community, reciprocity and responsibility to counter the postwar, social democratic picture of society riven by social inequalities, conflict and political resistance (Mullard and Spicker 1998; Coote 2000) Feminist politicians were also keen to bring feminist issues of gender inequality at home and at work into the policy frame (Wilkinson 1998; Coote 2000). These two motivations –​to create the right social conditions for a globalising economy and to further women’s rights and gender equality  –​were mismatched. Feminism became entangled with neoliberalism in complex and contradictory ways, at once aligned with and critical of the discourse (Fraser 2009; Newman 2013). This section offers a brief history of this structural reorientation of the society–​economy dynamic, and feminist alignments, to inform an analysis of how the language of policy-​making makes women’s work and home resources economically available for social care.

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Home economics

By the time New Labour came to power in 1997 the neoliberal economic model was creaking under the weight of growing social inequalities. Two key questions shaped political debate at the time: how to build and maintain economic credibility, which was essential for winning an election and for a place in the global economy; and how to create and maintain a cohesive and settled society, which was essential for social order and economic efficiency (Miliband 1994; Hutton 1996). To reframe politics, New Labour took a social turn, drawing on communitarian and feminist principles and language to redefine politics and the relationship between society and economy. Communitarian thinkers are critical of liberal individualism, pointing to the responsibility we have for each other rather than to claims for social recognition and individual rights (Mulhall and Swift 1992). Communitarianism offered New Labour a different image of society, the image of community. The assumptions and ideas that frame the discourse of community, Rose argues, redefine the social world as a space of interaction based on neighbourhoods and networks within which people’s lives can be contained and structured. In communities we understand ourselves to be not members of social classes, but of networks and reciprocal relationships of trust (Rose 2001). For Rose, discourses of community work in the strategic, economic interests of government. The language of community, of obligation, morals and responsibilities, he suggests, provides an ethical framework for governing individual behaviour in the construction of an ethical and ordered citizenry (Rose 2001). Thus New Labour switched the emphasis from social and economic rights that had been the basis of the welfare state and liberal democracy to individual and social responsibility as the legitimate goal for politics and policy-​making (Mullard and Spicker 1998; Powell 2000). They advocated a ‘social investment state’, a partnership between the state and civil society (Giddens 1998: 79) employing a new language of community, mutuality, consensus and responsibility and downplaying rights and

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The New Politics of Home

recognition, which are the bedrock of social democratic politics. Policies written from this perspective promoted flexible working hours, parental leave and a life–​work balance to ease boundaries between public and private, between home and work, so as to enable women and men to work and care in new and fluid ways. Critics of the underlying premise of these policies pointed out that politicians were economically motivated to reduce the welfare bill and to create a flexible workforce, with paid work as a route out of poverty (Lister 1998; Franklin 2000; Bryson 2007). It was argued that New Labour policies incorporated feminist issues of care and equality in their policy framework without challenging the structural conditions of gender inequality, which meant that women still had responsibility for either carrying out or organising caring work (Franks 1999; McKie et al 2002). Feminist critics initially struggled to position themselves in relation to the new community politics, which appeared to be forwarding a feminist agenda (Franks 1999). Women had fought long for opportunities in the public sphere and for adequate child and elder care and, while it seemed as though feminist concerns were being taken into account, the day-​to-​day effects were ambiguous (Franks 1999; Fraser 2009). Women were encouraged into the labour market ostensibly to enhance gender equality, while at the same time they still did the majority of unpaid care and domestic work at home (Coote 2000; Coote and Mohun Himmelweit 2013). Feminist observers saw that what might be seen as a transformative feminist agenda was in practice absorbed and diluted in the interests of flexible working in a globalising economy (Wilkinson 1998; Coote 2000; McRobbie 2000). It became increasingly clear that feminist issues were incorporated into neoliberal policy frameworks through a communitarian agenda that did not take account of existing structural or gender inequalities (Frazer and Lacey 1993; Franks 1999; Franklin 2000). A new feminist critique emerged that began to take account of the structural reorientation of society–economy and to describe the ambiguities of this new

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politics (Coote 2000; McRobbie 2000). As Elizabeth Frazer and Nicola Lacey argued, while communitarianism describes the social basis of women’s roles and experiences, this description has no critical purchase on whether these social practices are coercive, oppressive or demeaning. There is nothing in the communitarian perspective that allows for the view that there is anything problematic about gender divisions and unequal power relationships (Frazer and Lacey 1993). In the neoliberal reorientation of society–economy, communitarian and feminist perspectives (which are themselves contradictory) are employed to redefine society so as to edit out conflict and contradiction. Society comes to stand alone as a series of communities (Edwards et al 2006), to provide flexible workers and to free the economy from social responsibility (Powell 2000). The effect of this reorientation is that gender is at once incorporated into policy and rendered invisible. Gender, women’s work, home spaces and care are present in form and absent in practice in neoliberal policy (Molyneux 2002; Edwards 2004). Nancy Fraser identifies how this ambivalence occurs, not least in how changes in feminist theory itself pre-​empted and mirrored changes in public discourse. She argues that ‘a paradigm shift towards the dimension of recognition … arose exactly at the moment … when the Keynesian social-​democratic formation was beginning to unravel’ (Fraser and Littler 2014:  23). Trends in feminist theory turned from a critique of structural social and economic inequalities towards the recognition of differences, not least between women (Nicholson 1989). Fraser writes that this cultural turn ‘dovetailed all too neatly with a rising neo-​liberalism that wanted to repress all memory of social egalitarianism’ (Fraser 2009: 109). She finds that in this coincidence of goals ‘cultural changes jump started by the second wave have served to legitimate a structural transformation of capitalist society that runs directly counter to feminist visions of a just society’ (Fraser 2009: 99). The similarity between feminist and communitarian perspectives, where they appear to occupy a

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The New Politics of Home

similar social terrain, is useful to neoliberal policy-​makers, and so is emphasised over key political differences between them. Communitarian sensibility offers neoliberalism theoretical tools to misrecognise, slide over, or depoliticise gender and, feminist critiques of these perspectives are complicated to navigate (Frazer and Lacey 1993; Fraser 2009). The reorientation of economy and society and the ambiguities of gender politics in the neoliberal policy narrative, initiated by the New Labour government in 1997, was threaded through social care policy and practice in subsequent Coalition and Conservative governments. It propels the idea that the state should enable communities and individuals to take more responsibility for looking after themselves, legitimising the transfer of care, and its economic cost, from state to society, from institutions to communities and from communities to homes (Everingham 2003; Beresford 2008; England 2010). More recently successive Conservative governments have maintained this focus on personal space and responsibility while adhering to an austerity agenda, cutting the resources people need to look after each other in their communities (Women’s Budget Group 2016). The shift in perspective from community towards personal responsibility was legitimised through theories of positive psychology, happiness and resilience (Lister and Bennett 2010; Pykett 2012). David Cameron’s ‘big society’ initiative, for example, supported the idea that inequality is more a matter of individual psychology than of economics, and that material resources are not enough to satisfy individual needs that are subjectively defined (Cameron 2009; Coote 2010; Wainwright 2010). The aim of the big society enterprise was to enhance individual resilience and capacity as an alternative to state provision of welfare (Craig 2007). Personalised services and personal budgets are examples of policy mechanisms that would encourage individuals to define their own needs, design the kind of service they required and participate in those services (Duffy et al 2010; Pykett 2012):

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Personalisation means that the person who needs support should have real choice and control to get the support that works for them. It can involve people having personal budgets or direct payments to directly purchase support, but it also includes a focus on person-​centred thinking, and the principles of independent living. (Slay 2012: 2) The emphasis on individual autonomy and choice chimes with what people might want for themselves but takes little account of the social and economic conditions in which choices are made. This exemplifies the reorientation of neoliberal politics where it is the choices and behaviour of individuals that create conditions of poverty and social deprivation (Frazer and Lacey 1993; Lister and Bennett 2010). This perspective was outlined by the Conservative think tank, the Centre for Social Justice, who identify ‘five pathways to poverty’:  ‘family breakdown; educational failure; economic dependency and worklessness; addiction to drugs and alcohol; and severe personal debt’.1 As Ruth Lister and Fran Bennett argue: The Conservatives’ diagnosis of the problem of poverty is framed by the two tropes of ‘broken Britain/​society’ and ‘big government vs. big society’. Like New Labour, Cameron’s Conservatives understand the power of language. They deploy it skilfully to represent the problem of poverty and its causes and solutions in ways which place the main responsibility on the individual and on communities rather than on government. (Lister and Bennett 2010: 88) With this reorientation of social justice the emphasis on individual agency in community and markets redefines and slides over the financial and structural pressures experienced by poor families from day to day. Val Gillies argues that the big society narrative works ‘to buffer and reinforce relations of

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The New Politics of Home

oppression and exploitation by hiding them under the cloak of nature, benevolence and meritocracy’ (Gillies 2013: 92). The big society narrative masks the economic rationale of deep public spending cuts and austerity politics by asserting that they are caused by the social problem of welfare and dependency (Coote 2010; Wainwright 2010; Slay and Penny 2013). So from this perspective the purpose of government strategy and policy is to change the welfare culture to emphasise individual and community assets and capacities and to downplay needs, which are seen to be negative and indicative of dependency (Cameron 2009; Dean 2010; Ransome 2011). At the time of writing the Conservative government (from 2016) headed by Theresa May is preoccupied with negotiating a deal for leaving the European Union. The Labour opposition party, critical of neoliberal politics and inclined towards a traditional form of social democracy, has also changed the political environment. It proposes a ‘National Care Service’ to ‘increase social care budgets’ and an ‘increase in the Carer’s Allowance for unpaid full-​time carers’.2 Arguably this position on state funding for social care has focused the attention of the Conservative government so that current debates tend to circulate around issues of a crisis in social care, of the need for ‘fairness’ and of funding in times of austerity (Quilter-​Pinner and Snelling 2017; Needham et al 2018). The publication of a Social Care Green Paper originally promised for autumn 2018 is still awaited in spring 2019: The Government has said that the Green Paper will propose a number of options for social care and is seeking a consensus on the development of policies: The consultation will cover a wide range of options to encourage a very wide debate. It will set out options to improve the social care system and put it on a more secure financial footing, supporting people, families and communities to prepare for old age, and it will address issues related to the quality

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of care and variation in practice. It will include proposals on options for caps on overall care costs and means-​tested floors. It is, however, a consultation, and the Government wish to approach the future of social care in the spirit of consensus. Our consultation is designed to encourage a grown-​up conversation in order that society can rise to this challenge. ( Jarrett 2018) Though the emphasis has changed in the last couple of years to questions of consensus, fairness and funding, the narrative trajectory to shift responsibility for care from the state to individuals in families and homes has not been dismissed. The aim is still to build partnerships and collaborations between public and private, between individuals and communities, to create economies of care that might float free of government or state control and finance. It is also unclear in Labour policy how they might tackle gendered inequalities of care and resources. Fraser has pointed out that ‘neither the universal breadwinner model (in which working mothers strive to emulate male employment patterns) not the care-​g iver parity model (in which women are remunerated for being full-​time stay-​at-​ home mothers) is very satisfactory’. Instead she advocates ‘the universal care-​giver model –​in which both men and women are structurally enabled to share the load – as a fairer solution’ (Fraser and Littler 2014: 21). Policies that continue to place women at work and at home simultaneously create tensions and ambiguities in daily life and alter the terrain of feminist politics. As Lisa Adkins points out, women inhabit neither the social nor the economic in substantive ways, ‘in the UK, regardless (original emphasis) of domestic commitments the majority of women are now in waged work’, and ‘good mothering is now defined less by the continual occupation of the home and the selfless performance of care but by employment’ (Adkins 2009: 330). Yet, still ‘the basic feature of oppression is its division of the human population into

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The New Politics of Home

two lots: those who achieve transcendence through constructive activities and those relegated to the sphere of immanence’ (Veltman 2004: 122). ‘Home’ continues to signify personal space where women and children, nature and emotion, are separated from the public world of work, men, politics, science and rationality (Prokhovnik 1999; Blunt and Dowling 2006). These oppositions ‘valorize one side and devalue the other’ (Blunt and Dowling 2006: 17), where rational thinking and public life are the condition for freedom, creativity, individual autonomy and transcendence, and are superior to home, emotion, immanence and intimacy (Prokhovnik 1999; Blunt and Dowling 2006). What is happening here is that the neoliberal reorientation of society–economy flattens out and neutralises conflict but at the same time retains hierarchical gender relations between home and work, private and public. Women’s lives are caught in the contradictions between the two. They are associated with the immanence of the social sphere, with day-​to-​day care and domestic work, while also being expected to transcend the mess of the social to act as independent subjects in the public sphere (Franklin and Thomson 2005). It is as though the purpose of the social world, home, female subjects, care and intimacy is to create the conditions for the economy, and for independent subjects to be free. Social and intimate spaces are the powerhouse for public economic life. This poses a conundrum for neoliberal politics. On the one hand, this power cannot be valued or recognised because it displays dependency and human need, which must be overcome or dealt with in order for people to be free or transcendent individuals. On the other hand, if neoliberal policy-​makers wish to transfer social care to informal work and spaces, some economic valuing of the home and women’s work has to be recognised. Since value is conferred only through financial status or wage in neoliberal economics, policies have to be worded in such a way as to discredit dependency and to play up the entrepreneurial and capital value of home. At the heart of this

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conundrum is the question of how to extract the economic value of home while keeping dependency and need within the boundaries of home. This gives primacy to economics, and finds the social to be of use value. This is not, however, a straightforward economic calculation. At issue is the gendered division of labour that sits at the nexus between society and economy and is melded into the power dynamics of private–​ public and home–​work (Young 1997). In the next section I explore how such dynamics play out in relation to one policy document. Questions of home in policy discourse The dichotomies and distinctions which position women, care and the home in ambiguous and contradictory ways shape the linguistic mechanisms of contemporary policy discourse. With this understanding, neoliberal orientations of gender can be traced through the language used to describe social care policy. Policy language identifies economic subjects and resources: who is cared for, who does the work, the social and political terrain where care takes place and the material resources available for care (Fischer 2003; Jenkins 2011). To identify economic subjects, resources and policy problems, the terms ‘active citizens’, ‘untapped resources’ and ‘dependency’ are selected from the Coalition document A Vision for Adult Social Care:  Capable Communities and Active Citizens (DH 2010). This document was published at a critical moment in the trajectory of neoliberal discourse, when home emerged as the preferred site of social care. It is a statement of policy vision, with a focus on social care that is synonymous with home and gender (Sevenhuijsen 2002; Bryson 2007). The central policy problem to be solved in the document is the problem of dependency caused by overreliance on state welfare provision. It is proposed that the solution to dependency is the transfer of responsibility for care from the state to individuals and communities: ‘Care must again be about

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The New Politics of Home

reinforcing personal and community resilience, reciprocity and responsibility, to prevent and postpone dependency and promote greater independence and choice’ (DH 2010: 5). Following Fraser and Gordon’s genealogy, Ruth Lister reminds us that the use of dependency in policy terms coincides with a devaluing of the idea of ‘welfare’ which, in the UK, had previously referred more positively to social and economic rights and the safety net of the welfare state: the use of ‘welfare’ as a noun, synonymous with social security, … is problematic because of its association with a stigmatised US-​style residual form of poor relief. It is all the more stigmatising because of the constant coupling with ‘dependency’, so that in many people’s eyes receipt of social security is now equated with a ‘dependency culture’ that research does not in fact substantiate. (Lister 2013) from the time of the industrial revolution, along with paupers, woman were new personifications of dependency … combined to constitute the underside of the working man’s independence. (Fraser and Gordon 1994: 317) An independent/​dependent distinction in the document mirrors that of man/​woman or public/​private while at the same time taking gender out of the picture. In other words, rather than gender relations being a visible indicator of inequality as, for example, in the statement ‘a woman’s place is at home’, a phrase like ‘care of dependent persons at home’ carries implicit gender inequalities but dissolves them in explicitly neutral categories (Simon-​Kumar 2011). The distinction of independent/​dependent mirrors and flattens the man–​woman power dynamic, maintaining though diffusing the gender politics that it contains. Lister edges a nuanced feminist politics and critique in between the binary categories that obscure and maintain gender inequalities:

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the opposition in this debate lies not so much between dependence and independence, with interdependence representing the synthesis (though that argument is part of the debate), but between dependence and independence on the one hand and interdependence on the other. Central to this debate is the issue of women’s economic (in)dependence, which in turn needs to be related to physical and emotional (in)dependence, which are also significant in the construction of women as autonomous citizens. (Lister 2003a: 107) To solve the problem of dependency the document states that care will be ‘transformed –​not by looking upwards to the state, but outwards to communities  –​by empowering individuals and unlocking the power and creativity of neighbourhoods’ (DH 2010: 9). Empowered individuals, like the late modern transcendent individual, who are able to unlock creative resources are the sort of people who will solve the problem of dependency: empowered people and strong communities will work together to maintain independence. Where the state is needed, it supports communities and helps people to retain and regain independence. (DH 2010: 8) When people develop care and support needs, our first priority should be to restore an individual’s independence and autonomy. (DH 2010: 12) These ‘empowered people’ are the ‘active citizens’ in the title of the document, though there is a lack of clarity as to which people will work together towards independence. Nonetheless, at least three kinds of ideal individuals are inferred in the concept of active citizens: the active and entrepreneurial subject who is independent and makes rational choices; the caring, reciprocal,

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The New Politics of Home

compassionate and imaginative subject; and the flexible worker who balances paid and unpaid work. These individuals are characterised by activities or attributes rather than by identity or gender (Sevenhuijsen 1998; Tronto 2001). We can draw on a workforce who can provide care and support with skill, compassion and imagination, and who are given the freedom and support to do so. We need the whole workforce, including care workers, nurses, occupational therapists, physiotherapists and social workers, alongside carers and the people who use services, to lead the changes set out here. (DH 2010: 34) Social care already involves a diverse range of providers, including the voluntary and private sectors. But more can be done to make a reality of our vision of a thriving social market in which innovation flourishes. (DH 2010: 21) There is also some confusion over whether people are clients, patients, consumers or citizens and as to whether individual autonomy is linked to the idea of market-​based consumerism or is an important aspect of political citizenship (Clarke 2005; Clarke et  al 2007; Clarke et  al 2008; Newman and Tonkens 2011). Two other kinds of individual are explicitly described:  vulnerable individuals who are considered to be blameless though somehow deficient, since they ‘may lack capacity’ (DH 2010: 26); and dependent individuals who are subject to a ‘re-​ablement programme and effective rehabilitation’ so as to ‘regain independence’ (DH 2010:  29). By virtue of their vulnerability and dependency, these sets of individuals are subject to –​and so not free from –​the care and/​or the will of others. Dependent subjects, as Nadesan suggests, are considered to be ‘bad subjects, who are judged to be risking and/​or are perceived as incapable of rational self-​government’ or who are ‘capable only of limited self-​government’ (Nadesan 2008: 21).

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Active citizens

As Simon-​Kumar writes, New Labour ‘reconstituted the responsibilities of citizenship through the construction of subjectivity of the active citizen, that is, a political actor located in the intersections between the state, market, family and community’ (Simon-​Kumar 2011: 452; Lister 2011). With the Coalition government, the relationship between the individual and the state seemed to be one of desired detachment so that the individual can be free to engage in social/​community and/​ or economic/​market spheres. In practice, the dismantling of the welfare state and the negative press given to dependency on benefits and services (Lister 2013) leave citizens to care for themselves without due regard for the material home context of their lives. It is the conceptualisation of the citizen as active, empowered and responsible, John Clarke argues, that turns attention from what is actually going on, where the ‘the real dynamic of abandonment’ is masked. Through policy language, ‘intentional misrepresentation and mystification’ takes place, ‘concealing real purposes and interests’ (Clarke 2005: 5). From this perspective ‘activation is understood as making people into “market-​ready” workers, available to the extended hire and fire flexibilities demanded by corporate capital’ and of creating a marginalised, vulnerable class of ‘ “contingent” workers such as unregistered migrants’ (Clarke 2005:  453; emphasis original). This attempt to shape individual action through a ‘moral utilitarianism’ (Brown 1995: 36) blames certain individuals for their dependency on state services, making individuals responsible for systemic problems and active in defining their economic and social location and experience (Bakker 2007: 551). The activity of caring is specifically drawn into the repertoire of citizenship in the document. In feminist literature we find the argument that the rights of citizenship ought to expand to recognise the significance of care and care work across social and economic spheres (Lister 2003a; Tronto 2005). Kirstin Jacobson posits that

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The New Politics of Home

citizenship begins at home, making home at least as significant as public spaces for political action and rights, if not more ( Jacobson 2010, 2011). In this policy document care does not seem to be the activity of all citizens. Care is not the responsibility of transcendent or reflexive entrepreneurial subjects, whose role instead is to innovate or engage in creating new care markets. With care attached to specific subject or citizenship positions, questions are raised for feminist politics: Just how is caring an act of citizenship? Which citizens do this work? Where does this care take place? Is caring an activity for which all citizens have responsibility? The answers are unclear in the document, but it is clear that care is an activity to be contained in personal spaces in contrast to feminist perspectives where care is an intrinsic aspect of all human life: Care consists of everything we do to continue, repair and maintain ourselves so that we can live in the world as well as possible … In its broadest meanings, care is complex and multidimensional: it refers both to the dispositional qualities we need to care for ourselves and others, such as being attentive to human needs and taking responsibility to meet such needs, as well as to the concrete work of caring. (Tronto 2005: 130) In this view care is not an activity that is specifically located in the personal or intimate spaces of home and community but threads through all social, political and economic experience (Tronto 1993; 2005). Communities and homes may or may not be reciprocal or adequately resourced spaces for personal and intimate care. Women, encouraged into the workforce, are increasingly less available to do care work and to run the double or triple shift to get everything done (Hochschild with Machung 1989; Bakker 2007). Homes are often empty, with women and men at work, and are less likely to be resourceful places for care and comfort. Home is a marker of social and economic inequality, giving rise to questions as to

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the adequacy or condition of housing, heating and food –​of basic human needs (Dean 2010). For those in relatively secure family settings with adequate housing, financial resources and reciprocal relationships, home care may or may not be valued. For those living alone in insecure or even abusive relationships, in inadequate housing or with family members who are unable for whatever reason to provide informal care, it may be an added burden or even frightening and unsafe. In short, home as a place of security, comfort and nurturing care cannot be taken for granted (Burchardt 2008, 2013; Bryson 2013). Untapped potential

The personal resources necessary for caring include health and strength, time, willingness and availability, and the ability to build a caring relationship. The necessary material resources include the homes themselves (the building, utilities, fixtures and fittings), geographical location, a degree of cleanliness and comfort, and connections to other households, professionals, shops and public or private transport. The personal and material resources necessary for care are transmitted in the document as ‘untapped potential’, though how this capacity or power arises, or which resources may or may not be available, are unclear. Personalisation can also be achieved by harnessing the untapped potential of communities. (DH 2010: 17) Local councils should work to enable people, their carers, families and communities to support and maintain full and independent lives. This means unlocking the potential of local support networks to reduce isolation and vulnerability. Social care has a long history of building community capacity. A  renewed emphasis on this goes well beyond the social care sector and must focus on what people can do for each other. (DH 2010: 10)

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The New Politics of Home

The proposition is that the untapped potential of communities is harnessed to meet the deserving needs of vulnerable people so as to unlock a resource stream for a care economy. This capacity seems to refer to individual creative agency and community resources. Hartley Dean points out that, with an emphasis on capacity or assets as opposed to recognition of dependency and mutual need, individuals become detached from public responsibility (Dean 2010). Based on a ‘thin discourse of need’ neoliberal policy sets a scene where people are responsible for meeting their own needs regardless of the social and economic context of their lives or the resources available to them (Dean 2010: 92). Policies that seek to solve the problem of dependency, to enhance positive individual assets and to build community capacity run the risk of diverting attention away from the wider political forces that cause and maintain concentrations of poverty and unemployment (Craig 2007: 337). The role of the market or markets slides in and between public and private spaces. As Raewyn Connell argues, with the ‘strategy of endless commodification of services, needs formerly met by public agencies on the principle of citizen rights, or through personal relationships in communities and families, are now to be met by companies selling services in a market’ (Connell 2010: 22). Through the lens of privatisation, we can see the simultaneous commodification of some services that were previously provided by non profit and public organisations and the decommodification of others that must now be provided by families and individuals. The commodification/​decommodification process spreads the burden of work unevenly and restricts access to services in unequal ways. (Armstrong 2010: 197) In the blurring between and within public and private, ‘what is public in the sense of shared responsibility and services is not

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Home economics

only increasingly narrowly defined but it is also increasingly penetrated by private for profit business and practices’ (Armstrong 2010: 197). The success of this project, Meg Luxton argues, depends on the extent to which people buy into the idea that individuals and their households must absorb more of the work necessary to ensure the livelihoods and well being of their members. As various levels of government have implemented specific neoliberal policies, people have typically had fewer supports and resources available to them, making personal caregiving more difficult and fraught. (Luxton 2010: 163) Both ‘by default and by design, families, particularly women within them’ pick ‘up the work not provided publicly and not affordable personally’ (Bezanson and Luxton 2006: 5). It is assumed in the neoliberal scenario that cared-​for and caring individuals ‘will be able to act as both reasonable and responsible consumers’ (Clarke et al 2007; Lymbery 2010: 116). The market for social care is stimulated or launched with government backing, and is meant eventually to become detached from state support (Needham 2011). In neoliberal policy language, gendered practices and resources thread silently through words and phrases like ‘active citizens’ and ‘untapped potential’. As policy mechanisms, these phrases reflect the reorientation of the society–​economy dynamic and reorder gender binaries. Women and care work, though entirely present, are folded into new binary distinctions, resignified and rendered invisible. This is explored in more depth in the next section. The unsettled ground of home and care Feminist academics have disputed and untangled the neoliberal orientation of society and economy to show how feminised ideas have been absorbed into policy discourse to render intimate,

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The New Politics of Home

personal and material resources available for social care. This is specifically a reorientation of perspective through language, as discussed above in the analysis of policy discourse. Simon-​ Kumar and Jenkins argue that this reworking of the political terrain calls for a new kind of feminist critique, one oriented to the dualisms or binaries, like independent/​dependent, that structure policy thinking and populate neoliberal discourse ( Jenkins 2011; Simon-​Kumar  2011). Politics and policy-​making, Simon-​Kumar argues, can no longer be understood through the ‘dichotomies of male–​female/​ masculine–​feminine’ that are clearly gendered and denote a hierarchical relationship of power’ (Simon-​Kumar 2011: 458). Neoliberal binaries tend to diffuse power or to present it in non-​hierarchical ways, suggesting either oppositional human attributes like independent/​dependent, or constituting a flattened social or economic order, like individual–​community. In inscribing oppositional human attributes or horizontal spatial positions, new binaries avoid the recognition of structural identities and inequalities (Molyneux 2002). Binaries that denote human attributes include positive/​negative, independent/​ dependent, active/​passive; deserving/​undeserving and capable/​ incapable. Arguably this reordering is stimulated by and supports new economic formations as they emerge and are located in home and community settings in an ungendered coexistence of the economic-​social. Further, the binary independent/​dependent is ordered along two axes of difference. The first is an axis of economic and/​ or moral value where the independent, entrepreneurial or responsible subject is the preferred, useful or valued subject, and the dependent subject is morally lacking and a drain on public resources. The second axis is social difference, and is complex. This axis, in part, crosses either side of a binary that can be male or female, or any other combination of social inequalities. In other words, it may be argued that women can be entrepreneurial and that men often do care work. This

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Home economics

masks the wider gendered ordering of social categories, where independence is masculine and dependence is feminine (Fraser and Gordon 1994). The potential in new binary oppositions is that they integrate and diffuse the subject positions that have populated social conflict and oppositional politics in the past, while optimising their economic value. Conflicts once held in binary oppositions are dealt with in neoliberal discourse by erasing the language that describes them (Franklin 2007). Feminists have also questioned rigid identity binaries but to erase them without addressing their complexity, or the situation in which they arise, is problematic (Nicholson 1989; Frazer and Lacey 1993). Binary changes affect clarity of thinking about relations of power and knowledge. In the neoliberal politics of boundary redefinition, the conceptual or linguistic structure of conflict and emancipation is replaced with binaries that validate certain kinds of individual character and behaviour and negatively judge their opposites (Pykett 2012). On the face of it, neoliberal subjects are constituted and judged according to good or bad human characteristics, masking the continuation of binary oppositions where gender and other inequalities still circulate. Neoliberal citizens are strategically positioned in an economic–​social dynamic that is constituted through spatial binaries. These include conceptual binaries, as in presence/​ absence, inside/​outside, individual/​community or work/​home, which are subjective and material. Spatial binaries subvert the public/​private binary that, more or less, maintains a distinction between political and intimate spaces and has shaped the liberal democratic polity. With neoliberal spatial binaries, the Keynesian political order, which recognises hierarchies of power, is dismantled in favour of horizontal market mechanisms. The linguistic strategy that produces and flows through these binaries obscures distinctions between citizenship and economic/​ personal life (Newman 2012, 2013; Pykett 2012; Prǖgl 2015) and claims social spaces for economic value. In this way the

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The New Politics of Home

structural order of power and resources is obscured and overlaid by an economic–​social dynamic that absorbs market and intimate relations. Politics and power are edited out of this gendered order of economy-​social, where the transcendent economic infuses the immanent social to bring its ‘monstrous outside’ into the comfort of home spaces (Hennessey 2009: 310; see also Adkins 2009). Conclusions In this chapter I have traced how the society–​economy dynamic is reoriented in neoliberal discourse to align the social world to the needs of a free market economy. The architects of neoliberal policy have incorporated feminist ideas to capture home and women’s labour as an economic resource. This is a complex language politics. With the reordering and signification of binary patterns, women are analytically disembodied and conceptually separated from home and social reproduction, while at the same time located in caring social spaces (Simon-​Kumar 2011: 459). In neoliberal discourse home is positioned as the site of intimate economics where ungendered individuals have the capacity to connect home with choice and markets, so as to release potential for independence and freedom. Home is made into a utilitarian, economic category and inequalities are flattened and depoliticised. Home is where welfare services are distanced from political accountability and populated by economic actors; it is where intimacy, care and imagination are of economic value and subjects are more or less useful. Power circulates through home in neoliberal discourse through reordering social and individual subjectivities and celebrating freedom and agency while at the same time defining and limiting them. The document under review states that individuals will have more power and agency, but this is only economic power since neoliberal subjects are in fact distanced and separated from the political mechanisms, institutions and spaces that create the conditions for citizenship (Clarke 2005; Jacobson 2010). In this way neoliberal subjects

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Home economics

are alienated from themselves, since identity and citizenship are denied; from others, since home as a space of recognition is denied; and from the world, since the political is denied. Women experience the ambiguities of policy in their day-​to-​ day lives, where they are expected to be at work and at home simultaneously. Feminism is present and absent in neoliberal policy discourse; home is present and absent in policy language; and women are categorically present and absent at home and at work. Home, as Jacobson argues, might also be the ground of citizenship and of freedom ( Jacobson 2009, 2010; see also Chapter Six). This space of intimate and political energy has been colonised in neoliberal policy discourse to harness its economic value in such a way as to devalue women’s work and intimate relationships of care. Home as gendered practices, resources and spaces is conjured through certain words and phrases as an economic resource to solve the problem of dependency and to make public/​private space for the delivery of social care. Neoliberal discourse neutralises women’s work but still relies on women’s capacity to nurture and sustain those who require care. The following chapter offers a new framework for making visible the inequalities that surround such care at home.

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THREE Caring in domestic spaces: inequalities and housing Sophie Bowlby

Introduction Over the last few years there has been plenty of discussion in the British media of both ‘the housing crisis’ and ‘the crisis of social care’. However, possible interactions between these two ‘crises’ are rarely discussed. This chapter is about how housing, and the systems through which it is provided, affect the ability to give and receive care in domestic spaces. The focus is upon Britain and on the ‘care’, ‘assistance’ or ‘help’ provided to elderly, ill or disabled people of all ages in their domestic dwelling. However, these problems are not unique to the UK and reference will also be made other minority world countries. The chapter draws on analyses of the material, symbolic and economic aspects of housing’s intersections with care processes. The aim is to illustrate how housing matters to care, to argue that the role of housing in care is insufficiently recognised and to suggest fruitful ways in which this important topic might be examined further. The rest of the chapter is divided into the following sections: the next section introduces care and caring in

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domestic spaces and considers unequal access to care resources; the following and longest section illustrates the role of housing in care relationships in the light of previous discussions; and the final section concludes the chapter. Inequalities of care and caring in domestic spaces As the discussion of care in Chapter One has outlined, giving or receiving care within the ‘domestic space’ is part of most people’s taken-​for-​g ranted everyday life. The care exchanged between people in a dwelling is affected by its immediate environment –​the space, warmth and shelter it provides and the cultural meanings and practices associated with its characteristics. The physical environment of, and the services available in, a neighbourhood may also impinge upon caring practices linked to the home, for example, doing someone’s shopping, going for a walk together or keeping an eye on a neighbour. People’s activities beyond the home –​such as employment, education and leisure –​will also affect their availability for exchanges of care within it. These in turn are affected by social and cultural expectations about care and by the policies and practices of government, employers and service providers. Figure 1 illustrates some of the relationships involved. While practices of ‘care’ cannot be straightforwardly read as morally positive, since they open up possibilities of abuse and emotional manipulation, they are nevertheless vital to human survival. Care practices and beliefs produce social inequalities but social inequalities that are external to care (e.g., linked to gender, ethnicity or class position) are also incorporated into care practices and beliefs. Hence, the power relations expressed and (re)created in caring relationships are complex and multifaceted. It is contended here that, in order to understand inequalities in access to care or in the ability to care for others, it is important to think about how caring and care resources operate in time-​space.

40

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The New Politics of Home

Caring is done in and over time and space (Milligan and Wiles 2010). Care activities must be scheduled in time; they have durations and rhythms that influence how, when and where they can be done. For example, the durations and rhythms of meal preparation, eating, medication and sleep will affect the timing of domiciliary physical care for a frail elderly person who cannot do these tasks for themselves. The time scheduling of these activities will be influenced by the other commitments of carers and doctors and by the ease of getting to services, shops and the doctor’s surgery. This issue of everyday time-​space scheduling has been well explored in the case of childcare and is well known in, if not always at the forefront of, policy thinking on domiciliary care (McKie et al 2002; McDowell et al 2005, 2006; Timewise 2017). However, time, space and place are also significant to care in other ways. For example, the lifecourse is of particular significance to care and to our need to give and receive care, which changes as we age. Exchanges of direct care and of resources for care between the generations are important (Bowlby et  al 2010). Other time-​scales of significance relate to body rhythms, which affect such features as our sleeping patterns, fertility and ageing; ‘career time’, which relates to expected patterns of job performance over time that may clash with care demands; and the times at which services are available. A variety of spatialities are also central to care. The physical characteristics of a dwelling (warmth, space, shelter) will affect how easy it is to care for someone within it. The meanings of places –​rooms, dwellings, neighbourhoods  –​ reflect personal experiences and social meanings and affect feelings of ontological security and physical safety, as well as our experiences and practices of giving and receiving care. These meanings develop over time and hence are linked to the multiple time-​scales within which we live. Caring practices may also be affected by the (im)mobilities attendant upon caring, the significance of boundaries such as the walls of a house or the perceived boundary of a neighbourhood, and the

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Caring in domestic spaces

possibilities and limits of social media. Importantly, resources for caring vary over space. The ability to carry out care tasks in a particular place will be influenced by a variety of social, governmental, commercial and communications links, from the immediately local to global exchanges (Massey 2002) operating over different time-​scales. It is through such linkages that spatial (and temporal) variations in the number and quality of care services and care-​related resources –​including housing –​are created (Bowlby and McKie 2018). Thus, caring practices are always changing over time but are also momentarily fixed in particular ‘places’ –​where place is seen as ‘a moment in a wider relational space –​a particular point in the wider intersections of social relations’ (Massey and Thrift 2003: 281) or as ‘as a simultaneity of stories-​so-​far’ (Massey 2005: 54). Understanding caring thus requires analysis of these social relations and ‘stories’, and awareness of process and fluidity, but also an appreciation of the durability of many social relationships and understandings that can lead to entrenched patterns of inequality of access to care. These patterns of inequality occur on the ground in particular times and places, but flow from and reinforce inequalities in the financial, social and cultural capital people have accrued throughout their lives. It is widely agreed that the ability to build up these various types of capital is influenced by systematic inequalities in the social power of groups distinguished by class, race, gender, (dis)ability and sexuality. Theorists of ‘intersectionality’ suggest that such multiple oppressions interact at both the macro level of society and the micro level of individual relationships. Theories of intersectionality are thus of potential significance to understandings of how inequalities of financial, social and cultural capital between people feed into and reflect inequalities in the provision of care in domestic spaces. The concept of ‘intersectionality’ was initially developed by Crenshaw in 1989 as part of wider critiques by women of colour of the dominance of white middle-​class women’s ideas in feminist

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The New Politics of Home

theorising (Crenshaw 1991). It claimed that interactions between the social processes producing gendered and racialised inequalities are mutually constitutive. The concept has subsequently been extended to include other forms of subordination and oppression such as class, sexuality and disability. There is a very large feminist literature on intersectionality, which cannot be discussed here (see, e.g., Brah and Phoenix 2004; Hulko 2009; Dahmoon 2010; Anthias 2012; Walby et al 2012). Anthias (2012) suggests that the idea of ‘social arenas’ can be used to help focus empirical intersectional analysis. She distinguishes four interrelated social arenas: the organisational (structural position), the representational (discourse), the intersubjective (practice) and the experiential (narratives). In relation to informal caring in the home, there are intersectional processes that relate to each arena. For example, in both the organisational and representational arenas we might consider how ‘differences’ of gender, ethnicity, disability, citizenship and sexuality are involved in the legal and institutional treatment of households, families and individuals when providing services; in the intersubjective arena we might consider the everyday practices of caring, the relationships between carer and cared for, and the relations of both to outside institutions such as employers and local service providers; and in the experiential arena we can consider how carers and those cared for understand themselves and make sense of the embodied and affective activity of caring. The importance of recognising that categories such as race and gender are socially constructed leads many writers on intersectionality to emphasise the need to focus on time and context in any empirical analysis (Anthias 2012). For example, Hankivsky suggests that intersectionality ‘requires an analytic frame that takes into account the micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis, paying specific attention to time and space’ (Hankivsky 2014: 255; see also Hulko 2009). Despite such mentions of the importance of time and place/​space, little attention is paid in most general discussions of intersectionality to how different

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and often complex temporalities and spatialities are part and parcel of social relationships (but see Valentine 2007). It is suggested here that greater attention to ideas of spatial inclusion and exclusion, movement, connection and disconnection, and temporal synchronicities and discontinuities in processes at a range of scales (Marston 2000) would be helpful to empirical intersectional studies, including those of care. It seems that intersectionality provides a valuable set of questions and concepts with which to further interrogate our understandings of caring practices and relationships in domestic space. The literature on caring in domestic space suggests that distinctions and inequalities based on gender, class, (dis)ability, citizenship, ethnicity and age intersect with and modify one another (Doyle and Timonen 2009; Lovelock and Martin 2016). However, we also need to consider the spatial inclusions and exclusions created by the material forms and social practices within domestic dwellings and the ways in which the environment of the dwelling becomes bound up with and modified by social practices of caring within it over time. The next section discusses the significance of housing to practices of care and explores how inequalities relating to housing may intersect with the social inequalities that have already been established as important to domestic care relationships. Housing, home and care relationships People’s domestic dwellings and neighbourhoods are sites of care (or sometimes of the neglect of care) but they are also resources for care. This section discusses how inequalities in housing resources intersect with inequalities of care. Housing as an asset in time-​space

Lowe et al (2011) remark that in the UK, as in many other western countries, housing has come to be viewed in a new way.

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The New Politics of Home

They suggest that, starting in the 1980s, ‘British home owners came literally to “bank” on housing … thinking of it not just as a means to advance consumption but principally as a resource to fall back on’ (Lowe et al 2011: 105). Housing assets, they argue, have become a means by which homeowners can provide for their welfare needs in old age, either through the sale of a house to pay for residential care or by downsizing and releasing funds or by remortgaging (Overton 2010). Remortgaging can also be used to help fund children’s schooling or, later, children’s house purchases  –​expenditures which can be seen as ‘care’ for their children –​as well as a variety of other consumption expenditures. This shift in the role of housing, it has been argued, is a result of changes in the globalised finance system which led to cheap loans for house purchase and also for remortgaging. Governments are also thinking about ways to release the value tied up in housing to pay for chronically underfunded social care.1 This is summed up in the idea of ‘asset-​based welfare’ (Doling and Ronald 2010; Lowe et  al 2011), whereby most people amass assets (such as pensions and a dwelling) over their lifetime which are then used to meet the costs of care in old age. In such a scenario those without appropriate assets must rely on state support or philanthropy to meet many of their welfare needs. Access to the former has become increasingly limited as minority world economies pursue policies of austerity, and access to the latter is insufficient to meet demand. There are also significant problems with using housing assets as part of a long-​term solution to the cost of social care. Developments since the 2008 financial crash have halted the long-​term trend towards owner occupation, on which arguments encouraging moves to asset-​based welfare had been based. In England owner occupiers represented 63 per cent of households in 2016–​2017, a fall from a peak of 71 per cent in 2003. Nevertheless, the latent demand to acquire housing as an asset remains strong, since many still believe that property will

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Caring in domestic spaces

‘always’ increase in value and politicians talk of the desirability of helping people ‘get on the housing ladder’. Moreover, housing’s potential value for meeting welfare needs has increased with rising house prices, poor returns on non-​housing investments for most people and reduced welfare supply. Inequalities in access to owner occupation have thus become important not simply in relation to immediate differences in the living standards, costs and security of tenants and owners but also in relation to their ability to parlay their housing wealth, over time, into meeting welfare needs, including the need for care. For owner occupiers, then, the use value of their house becomes tied to the temporality of the lifecourse and to their ability to use housing wealth to meet their changing needs to give and receive care  –​childcare, self-​care, care purchase and ‘helping’ their children acquire similar assets –​as well as for non-​care purposes. Inequalities in access to housing asset wealth can thus be translated into inequalities in access to care services. As house prices and the size of deposits for house purchases have risen significantly relative to average earnings, and mortgage lending criteria have been tightened, few young people –​who cannot get family loans or gifts –​can hope to become owner occupiers. Hence ongoing class inequalities in access to housing assets are perpetuated (Christophers 2018). Furthermore, as Montgomerie (2015) argues, the idea that housing wealth accumulated in youth and middle age will be able to help pay for care in old age is based on the fallacy that ‘stable economic growth, low unemployment, stable working careers and a numerical balance between birth cohorts’ are sustained, an assumption that, she argues, has been undermined by finance-​led growth. Searle and McCollum (2014), using data from the English Housing Survey and population projections, show clearly that national and regional imbalances in the rates of growth of different generations are likely to limit the ability of older homeowners to sell or remortgage their homes for enough money to pay for care.

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The New Politics of Home

At present there are clear geographical as well as social class and age inequalities in access to housing asset wealth (Dorling 2014; Shelter 2014). House values are geographically uneven at the international, national and local scales. There are national variations in the availability of social housing and in the support to cover private rental costs, and the gap between earnings and house prices is geographically uneven in all nations. This gap affects both the asset values of housing and the opportunity to purchase for lower-​income potential buyers in most minority world countries. Those who must rent are dependent on a shrinking social housing sector or on private renting. In the UK, long waiting lists for social housing have led to many people who are eligible for social housing being housed by the private sector, while, in the rental sector, a shortage of supply of all housing, especially in more prosperous areas and major cities, has continued to drive up rents and to reduce the bargaining power of tenants and the quality of accommodation (Rugg and Rhodes 2018), a point that will be returned to below. The significance of the temporality of the lifecourse to the interactions between housing and care practices is also evidenced in the concepts and actualities of what are termed ‘housing careers’, ‘housing pathways’ or ‘housing transitions’ (Clapham 2002, 2005; Beer et al 2011; McKee 2012). These various approaches consider people’s housing moves or lack of movement over time, and see them as an outcome of interactions between structural features of housing provision (including the variation in housing availability, tenure and price over space) and people’s own agency as well as other factors such as the economy, welfare system and family structures and relationships. Empirical studies have emphasised that people do not necessarily improve their housing situation over the lifecourse. Many face unexpected events, especially job loss, relationship breakdown or serious illness, which can lead to negative moves into reduced quality, expensive or insecure housing or, for some,

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Caring in domestic spaces

homelessness. Some follow chaotic pathways, with frequent moves into temporary and insecure housing or homelessness. Their moves are often not sought but have been imposed by circumstances and may also be constrained and bounded in space as a result of institutional divisions or social exclusions to create lives that are ‘fixed in mobility’ ( Jackson 2012, 2015). Chapter Four illustrates how such interrelated housing and lifecourse pathways are also entwined with the shared lives of family and friends. The chances of following a housing career that results in deteriorating or static housing quality differ between people on the basis of parental resources (as discussed above, see McKee 2012; Christophers 2018), their physical or mental health or (dis)ability or that of a household member, and their earning power, which is itself related to the previous two factors. Thus, single women and people from stigmatised ethnic minorities are overrepresented among people who face difficulties in gaining adequate housing or improving their housing situation, as are people with mental or physical health problems, people with physical or learning disabilities and young people who lack parental resources to aid them in gaining housing, who are migrants or refugees or who are estranged from their family (Imrie 2003, 2004a, 2004b; Beer et al 2011; Hochstenbach and Boterman 2015; Jackson 2015; Mackie 2012; McKee 2012). The problems facing such people of finding adequate housing are widely acknowledged but, apart from the impact on ownership of housing assets which can contribute to meeting care costs, why should their housing problems be relevant to issues of care in domestic spaces? The answers relate, first, to the significance of the built form of housing  –​its size and arrangements of space and the adequacy of the warmth and shelter it provides for caring practices. Secondly, they relate to the role of a domestic dwelling in enactions and feelings of ‘home’ and identity which, in part, flow from and impact on care practices. Thirdly, they relate to the ability to create and

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The New Politics of Home

sustain networks of support. These issues are discussed below. Spatiality and temporality intermesh in all three issues. Domestic care and the built form of housing

Schwanen et al (2012) have used the term ‘entwined becomings’ to refer to the relationships between ageing in a place and the local environment. Here I  use the term to apply to the relationship between people and their domestic environment. In this relationship the capacities and sensory experiences of people’s bodies are central. Both bodies and the domestic environment are products of intertwined social and cultural relationships that, over time and in place, produce and change patterns of behaviour, meanings and experience. Houses reflect in their design and construction particular expectations of family and ideals of home life, as well as the building technologies and finance available for their construction. Since housing is long lived, it often embodies ideas of home, family relationships and standards of living that are no longer current. Much older housing is now considered of poor quality in terms of the shelter and warmth it provides and its prevalence varies over space. The significance of housing quality –​particularly the ability to keep residents warm, dry and secure  –​to bodily health and well-​being is very well established by many studies and acknowledged in the Decent Homes policy established by the British government in 2001 to improve the quality of social housing (Marsh et al 1999; National Audit Office 2010). Poor housing thus directly increases the demand for care from ill people, especially from those suffering from respiratory diseases, as well as the chance of injury from falls and other accidents. It also contributes to feelings of insecurity from burglary and a lack of self-​esteem and mental well-​being, which themselves contribute to ill health (Gilbertson et  al 2008; Green et  al 2011; Musson and Bowlby 2013). Poorly designed bathrooms,

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Caring in domestic spaces

circulation spaces and kitchens also make care-​giving and self-​ care harder. These difficulties are very significantly increased for people who have, or in later life develop, a wide range of bodily impairments. The lack of accessible homes is a major problem for people with such impairments in the UK. As Imrie remarks, ‘the impaired body is rarely imagined or drawn into domestic design’ (2004a:  746). Adaptations to existing dwellings are frequently needed both for carers or assistants to provide help and for occupants to care for themselves. Those who need accessible housing find housing moves frustrated and their ability to take part in normal social interchange limited by problems of access not only within their own dwellings but also within the dwellings of their friends (Imrie 2003, 2004a, 2004b; Mackie 2012). Despite this need Power and Gaete-​Reyes (2018) use the examples of the UK and Chile to show how the provision of housing adapted for disabled people has been undermined by neoliberal policies that encourage the marketisation of social housing and that limit regulation and its enforcement. For those who rent from social landlords, suitable adaptations can take a long time to achieve because of problems of bureaucracy and limited state funding. For those in private rented accommodation the prospect of adaptations is remote and, while owner occupiers can make suitable changes for themselves, these are often costly. People with bodily impairments may be reluctant to move if they have managed to find or create suitable properties or find a move difficult to accomplish because of the lack of accessible accommodation (Imrie 2004a; Mackie 2012). These difficulties are a consequence not of disability per se but rather of the intersection of the poor employment prospects and low incomes of many disabled people, the lack of provision of accessible housing in a housing market dominated by production for those on middle and higher incomes, and the lack of appropriate regulations to mitigate this situation, as

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well as by the construction and bureaucratic practices, which marginalise issues of bodily impairment, and by the broad dissemination of belittling and condescending discourses on disability (Imrie and Hall 2001; Power and Gaete-​Reyes 2018). The significance of housing to self-​care, health and well-​ being is strikingly illustrated by a study of the barriers to using home dialysis among 249 patients in East London assessed as suitable for this treatment (Forbes et al 2013). Home dialysis gives users more autonomy, allows them to schedule dialysis to suit employment or studying demands, reduces travel time and costs, contributes to long-​term survival and is cheaper than hospital-​based provision. A high proportion of the patients (66 per cent) were from non-​white ethnic groups, reflecting both the high incidence of end-​stage renal disease in these groups and the characteristics of the local population. Sixty-​nine per cent lived in dwellings that were either rented from a private landlord or were let to a local authority to house homeless families. Sixty-​seven per cent of dwellings did not meet the government’s Decent Homes Standard. Out of the 249 only one dwelling was found suitable for home haemodialysis and only 72 (29 per cent) for home peritoneal dialysis –​the others were rejected on either space or health and safety grounds. This was despite residents’ willingness to make modifications to their lifestyles and living arrangements in order to accommodate the equipment. This study illustrates the intersection of the range of social (ethnicity, income, housing tenure) and dwelling characteristics (space, hygiene facilities) that affected these people’s ability to make use of a recommended form of treatment for self-​ care within their dwelling. At a broader scale it shows how the organisation of the housing market intersects with the employment market and racialised disadvantage to limit some people to poor housing and thus affect people’s ability to care for themselves in their homes.

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A further example of the significance of the characteristics of the dwelling to care is provided by the UK’s ‘Removal of the Spare Room Subsidy’ policy introduced in April 2013, popularly known as the ‘bedroom tax’. Tenants of social housing are assessed for the number of rooms ‘needed’, and housing benefit is reduced by 14 per cent if they have a ‘spare’ bedroom and 25 per cent if they have two (Guardian 2016). The aim was to use the social housing stock more efficiently by encouraging tenants to ‘downsize’, and to reduce expenditure on housing benefit. Almost two-​thirds of affected tenants have a disability (Dorling 2014), and many have adapted their dwellings to accommodate this or have had them adapted by their local authority. The impact of the policy has been affected by a lack of locally available smaller social housing properties for people to move to and by people’s unwillingness to move. A study of the impact of the policy in the north-​east, an area with few small social housing properties, found that it had had major negative impacts on tenants’ mental and physical health, and that many people were reluctant to move because of adaptations and improvements they had made to the house (Moffatt et  al 2016). An assessment commissioned by the Department for Work and Pensions of the first 20 months of implementation (DWP 2015) showed that only 8 per cent of these people had moved. Of the 83 per cent still affected by the tax at the end of the assessment, over half (57 per cent) had cut back on household essentials (76 per cent of them on food) in order to afford the rent. The policy has also been criticised for assumptions about what are and are not ‘appropriate’ intimacies in deciding on what rooms are ‘needed’ (Brown 2015) and for being part of a ‘moralisation of tenure’ which renders social tenants as ‘socially and morally deviant, and thus undeserving of the same rights as property owners’ (Nowicki 2018: 663). A successful challenge to the legality of the policy was made based on two test cases, which argued that a ‘spare

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The New Politics of Home

room’ was needed to store equipment and accommodate overnight carers for a severely disabled child and for spouses who needed to sleep separately because of a physical disability. However, in other cases judges have ruled that, although the policy discriminates against disabled people, it is justified and therefore such discrimination is lawful. Care, ‘home’ and identity

A ‘home’ is often presented in popular discourses as a place of familial care and love, a ‘warm’ place of safety and security, privacy, control and comfort (Somerville 1992; Mallett 2004; Dyck et  al 2005; Bowlby 2012b). However, this popular presentation of ‘home’ refers to an idealised, nostalgic vision of ‘family’. It glosses over both the wide variety of family forms and single living that are now common in many minority world countries (Williams 2004) and the tensions and exhaustion that many people experience in trying to combine paid employment with care demands (Hochschild with Machung 2012; McDowell et al 2005, 2006), and ignores entirely the existence of domestic violence and elder abuse between family members and between formal carers and those they care for (Kosberg and Garcia 1995; Renzetti et al 2001). Nevertheless, much care does take place within the domestic space both between family members and between friends and family. These caring relationships within the ‘home’ provide for many people experiences that sediment over time, ways of behaving and feeling that provide ontological security,2 and practical support with everyday life. ‘Homes’ give many people an opportunity to mark out their social identities, in the fittings and furnishings and the practices of home upkeep, as well as in relationships based in and around the home (Madigan and Munro 1996; Bowlby 2012b). Home-​based ontological security and expressions of identity are most easily achieved in tenures that give some expectation that occupants can remain in place

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and that are affordable. Lack of security of tenure can have negative consequences for ontological security, as the example below illustrates. The UK government recently passed legislation removing mandatory security of tenure from new social housing tenants and giving them fixed term tenancies (FTTs). In a study of pilots of this programme, Fitzpatrick and Watts (2017) note that, while some tenants given an FTT were not concerned because they did not intend to stay in social housing or did not believe that they would be evicted at the end of their tenancy, many were: ‘Older people, people with health or disability issues, and families with children tended to be the most concerned, though more pronounced anxiety was not confined to those groups’ (Fitzpatrick and Watts 2017: 1032). Some of these tenants had had to move because of the bedroom tax and found themselves facing a FTT in their new social tenancy. Fitzpatrick and Watts observe that the ‘loss of security of tenure was detrimental to many tenants’ sense of stability and belonging’ (2017: 1033). Positive feelings and habitual practices linked to the home may be disrupted or threatened by illness or disability, which leads to a need for formal carers or the intrusion of health-​care equipment into the domestic space. Dyck et al (2005) and Angus et al (2005) have shown in their study of experiences of long-​ term care in Ontario, Canada, how ‘as a symbolic and material space its [the home’s] meanings are necessarily destabilised when care services provided by outside workers enter the home’ (Dyck et al 2005: 181). Carers entering the home may need to help with tasks and enter areas that are normally seen as private and intimate, such as bedrooms and bathrooms (Twigg 2000). They often have to disrupt established or preferred ways of ‘doing home’ (Bowlby et  al 1997) and in so doing may challenge residents’ ontological security and expressions of identity. Tensions over the different ‘logics’ of domestic and health-​care relationships and practices are commonplace, especially when the care workers are employed by an outside private or state

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The New Politics of Home

agency and have to conform to their working practices (Angus et al 2005). In the UK employment by an outside agency is the most common arrangement for carers, even where care funds are placed in the hands of the person needing care, as with ‘personal budgets’. In successful caring relations those involved adapt and adjust to new ways of ‘doing home’, but in less successful ones tensions and unhappiness with changes may result. As the studies cited have shown, successful relationships are easier to establish when carers have good training and are paid well, and have adequate time and autonomy to meet and establish the needs of the person cared for –​a situation which is rare in state-​funded but market-​delivered domiciliary care in most minority world countries. In the UK, as in other European countries, over the last two decades, long-​term care services have been limited, working conditions for care workers have worsened and informal family carers have had to pick up the slack left by inadequate state-​funded care services (Ranci and Pavolini 2015). Housing pathways and networks of support

Networks of friends and family who can provide support when needed are vital to everyone, but some also need the input of professional carers. Establishing and maintaining such networks requires effort from all involved. Networks of support will extend beyond the local, but local ties are particularly valued for practical as well as emotional support. The latter can be given by letter, phone, Skype or online ‘chats’, but physical care requires co-​presence. For example, Wellman (1996) showed in the case of Canada that, in relation to care-​g iving by non-​household members, ‘local’ may include people living up to half a day’s journey away. For frequent daily visits to provide care, ‘local’ needs to be even closer in physical distance. A socially acceptable home with adequate space for friends and family to visit also contributes to the ability to develop and maintain relationships (Musson and Bowlby 2013).

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Caring in domestic spaces

As mentioned above, a range of critical life events experienced by individuals such as divorce, ill health and loss of secure employment may lead to housing insecurity and housing moves, depending on the housing market situation that confronts them. Some of these moves will be initiated by the individual but others may be a result of state policies. For example, many minority world countries have housing policies that include redevelopment and the relocation of residents who live in state-​supported housing. This relocation may not be in the immediate locality of the original dwelling. Some states provide housing for people who have been made homeless, but again this may not be in the local area. Other state policies may reduce people’s incomes and hence result in forced residential moves or homelessness. In particular, workfare policies and policies to support disabled people and people with chronic illnesses have become less generous with the influence of neoliberal socio-​economic policies and the effects of austerity following the Great Recession of 2008. People obliged to make frequent moves –​such as those in insecure housing or those who are homeless and ‘sofa surfing’ or living on the street –​may find it harder to establish or maintain networks of support. But, paradoxically, such networks can be vital in providing information about housing opportunities and ways of finding or maintaining a suitable dwelling. Hochstenbach and Boterman (2015) show the importance to young people in Amsterdam not only of monetary capital, but also of cultural capital and of links to others living locally, in finding adequate and reasonably secure accommodation. Mackie (2012) shows the significance of appropriate support and information about housing from peers and professionals for young people with disabilities who wish to live independently, sometimes against the wishes of their parents. Such support must be provided sensitively and consistently but is often absent; in part, this reflects the financial pressures on social services and in part, a lack of awareness of the need.

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Studies of the impact of forced moves or of the resistance to such moves illustrate the significance of local support networks. For example, in 2013 the UK Coalition government brought in a ‘benefit cap’, linked to average incomes, to limit the total amount of benefits a family could receive. About two-​thirds of those affected initially were single-​parent families, and two-​thirds were unlikely to be able to take up employment because of ill health or the need to care for small children (Child Poverty Action Group 2017). One possible reaction was to move some distance away to an area of cheaper housing. An early assessment of the cap in Haringey noted that, despite potential financial hardship, many were reluctant to move because of their children’s education, because they relied on support from local family and friends or because they were giving support to family, especially elderly relatives (Davies et al 2013). These reactions both illustrated the importance people attach to local informal support networks and provoked alarm that forced moves to cheaper property many miles away may sever them. Studies of the impact of the UK ‘bedroom tax’, discussed in the previous section, also show the significance of local social networks and how these may be weakened by poverty resulting from increased rent. Lack of income reduces people’s ability to travel to see family and reduces their expenditure on heating and food, which means that they are unwilling to have visitors (Moffatt et  al 2016). This produces the paradoxical situation where government benefit cuts undermine the ‘community’ and ‘family’ ‘self-​reliance’ that they are meant to encourage. Urban redevelopment and ‘renewal’ have long been implicated in breaking social networks both through ‘slum clearance’ and, more recently, the break-​up of council estates through transferring ownership to housing associations and redeveloping them into ‘mixed communities’. For example, in a study of the highly contentious redevelopment of the Aylesbury Estate in London into a ‘mixed community’ Lees (2013) reports on the

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experiences of people being moved out, not all of whom would be financially able to move back in. One interviewee reported: —​—​’s probably in his late 50s and he lives with his wife. He’s lived here all his life. He’s got people that would see him on a daily basis and his family lives here in the area. He’s now living there isolated just outside Sidcup having broken all of his social ties. He’s now suffering from severe depression. I think that’s symptomatic of a lot of people. (tenant interview 2011) (Lees 2013: 934) The impacts of these removals and of welfare cuts to housing support are spatially uneven, reflecting variations in housing costs and stock and in the availability of employment. They are also socially uneven, reflecting social inequalities of class, ethnicity, (dis)ability, gender and age in both housing and employment markets and in caring relationships. However, as Sandhu and Sanderson note, many assessments of the impact of welfare cuts look at each ‘group’ individually and fail to examine or even discuss ‘the intersection of different forms of inequality’ (2015: 176). Conclusion I have put forward three contentions. First, several dimensions of housing are of central importance to care practices in domestic spaces. Second, analysing the inequalities arising from and impinging on such care relationships requires an intersectional-​ type approach. The examples given suggest that housing access should be considered as an important  –​though not a fixed, pregiven or unified –​social category in such an analysis. Third, analysing domestic care relationships requires attentiveness to the temporalities and spatialities of the ‘entwined becomings’ of these relationships with housing and ‘home’.

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The section ‘Housing as an asset in time-​space’ illustrated the importance of the temporality of the lifecourse to the use of housing as an asset to pay for welfare needs, especially care in old age and giving adult children access to housing assets. It also suggested that inequalities in gaining housing assets are linked to the globalised finance system, to the areal differentiation of house types and costs and to social inequalities of income and wealth. The temporality of the lifecourse is also implicated in varied housing careers. These can lead to further inequalities between people, which are associated with their social characteristics, in their access to dwellings that they can afford and that provide adequate hygiene, space, warmth, internal access and security. The section ‘Domestic care and the built form of housing’ gave examples of the importance of the built form of housing to the care that is given within it –​this relates particularly to self-​care for people with disabilities and also to physical care-​giving by informal, paid or volunteer carers. The section ‘Care, “home” and identity’ showed how discourses and practices of care and home-​ making are linked to the histories of shared lives within a dwelling and to the importance of home in identity and ontological security and in maintaining socially appropriate boundaries within different spaces in the home. Insecurity of tenure or finance can damage ontological security. But the dwelling is not an impermeable space. The final section on ‘Housing pathways and networks of support’ showed how the lives of people living in any particular dwelling are tied to those of others beyond its walls, through caring and other relationships, some of which may be of long standing. These relationships may also be linked to the use of particular services. Maintaining these relationships requires money and time, as well as the mental, physical and financial resources for, and confidence in, giving care –​each of which may be undermined by the experience of poverty. These examples illustrate the importance of such social categories as (dis)ability, class, gender, ethnicity and age, as well as of housing, to care. However, they do not provide a

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deep analysis of how these various and fluid social categories intersect with each other and with housing. This reflects the lack of intersectional analyses of care and housing. Using the framework of Anthias’s (2012) four social arenas, I have given some examples of how structural relationships in the housing market and the employment market, along with reductions in welfare entitlements, affect access to housing and impact on domestic care, and of how gendered discourses of home and family are also implicated. Less space has been given to caring practices and individual narratives. My aim has been to provoke further interest in exploring the intersection of the social category of housing with other social categories in analyses of caring in domestic dwellings. At present, housing policy is high on the political agenda but in popular debates the focus is on the difficulties for young people of getting on the ‘housing ladder’ and acquiring housing assets. Little attention is paid to questions of housing’s role in care and how equal access to housing that facilitates good care can be enhanced. Thus, this chapter is intended to contribute to and to stimulate richer intersectional analyses of care and housing and their policy implications.

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FOUR Relational biographies in times of austerity: family, home and care Sarah Marie Hall

Introduction As previous chapters have shown, in times of austerity, family, home and care come to the forefront of personal and political debates. Austerity cuts have been levelled most significantly at welfare and social care recipients, impacting families and communities who were already struggling beforehand. Recent public spending cuts, such as those in the UK since 2010, have also been distinctly gendered, impacting on the areas of socio-​economic life where women are the key recipients or beneficiaries (Pearson and Elson 2015). Since family, home and care likewise are associated with gendered spaces, practices and responsibilities, it stands to reason that women’s everyday lives are especially impacted by austerity. Although this is an area of growing academic interest, how austerity is lived in and with remains less understood than we might expect, particularly as it relates to everyday personal lives (Hall 2018b). This therefore raises questions of how to research everyday personal lives, and of research methods, which are the focus of this chapter.

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Drawing on thinking across human geography and sociology, and engaging with key concepts such as ‘lifecourses’, ‘personal lives’ and ‘relational biographies’, with this chapter I explore the impact that austerity can have on personal and ‘linked lives’ (Elder 1994). I  consider how these interconnected biographies knit together people and relationships, and spaces of home, care and family, in times of austerity. To illustrate these ideas I draw upon three ­vignettes –​from Kerry, Zoe and Selma –​collected as part of an ethnographic research study with families and communities in ‘Argleton’ in Greater Manchester, UK. This project took place between 2013 and 2015 and the focus was on everyday social relationships –​family, friendship and other intimate relations –​in the context of deep spending cuts. Greater Manchester, like many northern towns and cities in the UK, has been particularly badly hit by fiscal austerity policies, and proved to be a fitting place to carry out this research (see Hall 2017 for more details). The findings described here come from ethnographic encounters, including the use of a biographical mapping tool developed as part of the ethnography. A low-​tech participatory technique, the tool was used to focus discussions with participants about their personal biographies, as a way to draw out different types of narrative and forms of data about their personal lives. Using these data, I reveal how austerity is threaded through the fabric of family, home and care and interwoven with personal and relational biographies. Ultimately, this chapter makes the case for developing both theories and methods for understanding personal and relational biographies in times of crisis and austerity, in order to thoroughly explore and explain the knottiness of everyday lives as they are lived, told and remembered. Lifecourses, linked lives and relational biographies: an interdisciplinary conversation Taking a personal lens to austerity  –​that is, understanding the impact austerity makes on everyday lives, practices and

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relationships –​requires a theoretical approach that also appreciates and foregrounds personal biographies. As such, theories of the lifecourse are particularly conducive to this type of research. Lifecourse approaches are interdisciplinary and multimethod in scope, involving scholars across the humanities and social sciences, and techniques that traverse the qualitative/​quantitative divide. Nonetheless, in more recent years geographers have developed a particular interest in the lifecourse, linked lives and relational biographies, or the ways in which personal and social circumstances are interwoven, both within personal lives and across generations. One key area of interest within lifecourse geographies has been the concept of transitions, or what are more widely understood as ‘a pressing sense of temporality; of progress, change, and, in many cases, the irreversible passage of time as a person, group, or thing (or combination thereof) develops from one state of being to another’ (Brown et al 2012: 1607). A focus on transitional elements of the lifecourse, and their variations, has helped towards rethinking age and biography beyond life stages. As demarcated periods of (hetero)normative life progression marked by so-​called vital life events, such as getting a first job, marriage, having children, and so on –​life stages are considered to be ‘the result of institutional projects’ (  Johnson-​Hanks 2002:  866), including the dominance of ideologies of ‘the family’ (see Stacey 1998). Contemporary writings on the lifecourse therefore push for a renewed focus on the ‘complexity and non-​linearity of situated lives’ (Hörschelmann 2011: 379), and a recognition that ‘once-​linear forms of progression to adulthood have become more complex and even reversible’ (Brown et al 2012: 1612). Lifecourses are encountered over and through time as well as space, and thus social and cultural geographers have made the case for ‘the importance of a spatial, as well as a temporal lens’ to the lifecourse and biographies (Evans 2014:  564; also see Hopkins and Pain 2007). For instance, it is difficult to think about

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the lifecourse without thinking about context, or what some have understood as the folding and ‘unfolding’ (Hörschelmann 2011: 378) of time, space and place. McKie et al’s (2002: 903) development of the notion of ‘caringscapes’ also works towards applying a spatial-​temporal lens, with a particular focus on ‘the time–​space relations implicit in combining caring and working’. They argue that ‘everyday realities of managing spatial and temporal frameworks are informed by past experiences and future anticipations of caring’ (McKie et al 2002: 904), that is, time is not sequential but flows into everyday practice in the form of memories and aspirations. To add further texture to lifecourse geographies, relationality has also emerged as a significant factor, what Bailey (2009: 409) describes as ‘how individuals and groups organise their lives in relation to one another, society and its institutions’. Hopkins and Pain (2007: 287) have similarly explored ‘what relational geographies of age might look like’, focused in particular on intergenerationality, intersectionality and the lifecourse. Alber (2016: 19), for instance, in critiquing Johnson-​Hanks’s (2002) theory of vital conjunctures in the lifecourse, argues that ‘Johnson-​Hanks is focusing on individuals and their trajectories in their own life-​courses’ rather than on ‘inter-​generational entanglements’. She makes the case that ‘people are acting, in any moment of their life, not only on the basis of their knowledge and experience referring to the past, but also in relation to an envisaged future which is, at the same time, unknown and contingent’ (Alber (2016: 19–​20). Lifecourses are therefore relational according to both (past and future) selves or biographies and other people and places. This relationality also implies interdependencies, or the presence of others within experiences of the lifecourse. In the case of care, these dependencies are especially pronounced, altering due to ‘the temporality of the human life course … and the temporality of the daily routines of the people

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and institutions with whom a person habitually interacts’ (McKie et  al 2002:  905). With relationality also comes inequality, a recognition of which relationships matter, the power relationships they are founded upon and how they are crystallised around certain times, spaces and responsibilities, namely, home, family and care. For example, it is women in families, communities and society at large who shoulder the greatest responsibility for paid and unpaid labour (Pearson and Elson 2015; Hall 2018a). One notable result of such relational thinking is in resocialising understandings of the lifecourse, and recognising ‘the mutual precarities and unpredictabilities of lives and societies in transition’ (Hörschelmann 2011: 379). An example of this, and commonly referred to within geographical literature, is the notion of ‘linked lives’. Often credited to Elder (1994: 6), the concept rests on this key notion of interdependency, that ‘human lives are typically embedded in social relationships with kin and friends across the life span’. The central premise is that social lives do not exist in isolation but ‘personal decisions are taken in relation to the life trajectories, needs and understandings of others who lead their lives in connection to ours’ (Hörschelmann 2011: 379; see also Hopkins and Pain 2007). Within sociological literatures, the idea of relational biographies has been applied. This is in many ways similar to the notion of linked lives, but as a concept it has been deployed less frequently and in a slightly different context. For Heaphy et al (2013), ideas about relational biographies have emerged from work on same-​sex marriages. They posit that ‘biographies, like self-​identities, are narratives that people tell to themselves and to others. They are fundamentally relational in that they are formed, rehearsed and reshaped in the interactions with (real and imagined) others over time’ (Heaphy et al 2013: 61). There are reminders here of Gillis’s (1996) notion of the families that we live with and by, and that the imaginary is intrinsic to thinking

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and doing family and personal life (also see Smart 2007). For Heaphy et al (2013: 62) there is value in such an approach, for it troubles the idea that individualised selves are disconnected from the socio-​cultural contexts and from the families, communities and relational conventions in which they were formed. By adopting a relational view of biographies, we aimed to forego the idea that society today should be seen as ‘a society of individuals’ and that the individual has superseded families, close relationships and communities as the unit of social reproduction. At the core of the notion of relational biographies, then, is again this notion of ‘interdependency’. Like linked lives, it represents a move away from seeing lifecourses as strictly about individuals and more as shared projects –​‘relational achievements rather than individual choices’ (Hörschelmann 2011: 379). Furthermore, while most of the aforementioned literatures focus on lives as interconnected through proximity and relationships (kinship, friendship, community, neighbours), personal lives may also be linked in more abstracted (by which I mean, less proximate, obvious or direct) ways. Generational trends are one such example, and periods of austerity are an example of when such linkages have been observed. Recognising the importance of context, time and space in life decisions, Leach et al (2013), for instance, use an intragenerational approach to explore consumption patterns among baby boomers in the UK, whose parents were raised in wartime austerity. Looking at more contemporary periods of austerity and economic crisis, Camfield (2011: 671) argues that time is a central concept for understanding ‘the way economic crises have created a temporal rupture in young people’s lives’. Christophers (2015: 210) also makes the case that economic crises are ‘highly subjective, and thus relative’.

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It is here that the core elements of my approach come into play –​care, home and family in the context of lived experiences of austerity. For a relational approach accounts not only for who is enrolled into personal biographies but also where and when these take place. As Hörschelmann (2011: 380) encapsulates it, ‘social inequalities impact on and are responded to in individual life trajectories’. In the context of austerity, social inequalities have been shown to be especially personal, disproportionately impacting on women, black and minority ethnic groups, young people and disabled people (Hall et al 2017). And yet, of course, in the context of the literature above we might also expect austerity politics to be relational, impacting as they do on particular groups, communities and sections of society (see Hall 2018b). The impacts of austerity on family, home and care have been acute due to a combination of factors. In the UK fiscal cuts to social care budgets have offloaded care onto family members and into the informal, private sphere of the home (see Chapter One). Cuts to housing benefit have meant that recipients are required to spend more of their remaining income on housing costs or to rely more on networks of family and friends, pushing many people into poverty (if they were not already), changing social relationships and responsibilities, and shaping where and with or near whom people can afford to live or work (Henwood et al 2010; Smith 2011; Heath and Calvert 2013; Wilkinson and Ortega Alcazer 2017; Hall 2018b). Significant alterations to other types of welfare, including child tax credits, have exacerbated these trends, and have impacted most on women as the key recipients and benefactors of social security (Pearson and Elson 2015). Furthermore, instabilities within the housing and labour markets following the economic recession have led to ongoing precarities around unemployment, low wage and low-​quality employment and the stagnation of wages in real terms (Aalbers 2009; Christophers 2015; Pimlott-​Wilson 2017).

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This toxic mix of cuts, changes and challenges under austerity also often impact the same segments of society (Hall et al 2017). These are not individualised impacts but they ricochet within families, homes and communities. As Hopkins and Pain (2007: 291) put it, ‘familial relations … as well as the range of markers of social difference influence and demarcate people’s experiences of the lifecourse’. Thus, the impacts of austerity are relational in both key senses: according to personal and proximate relationships (e.g., family, friends) and practices (such as care), and according to societal trends (e.g., generational). As such, this is a fitting social context in which to trace empirical qualities of linked lives and relational biographies. In the next section I shall describe how such empirical research may be developed. Developing tools: biography and ethnography The data drawn upon in this chapter were, as mentioned, collected as part of a broader ethnographic research project with families and communities in ‘Argleton’, Greater Manchester. The fieldwork focused on six families of varied socio-​economic background and household composition, recruited via community gatekeepers, all of whom were self-​selecting and took part in the research for between 8 and 15 months (see Hall 2017, 2018a). The ethnography mainly employed observational methods, accompanied by taped discussions and participatory tasks. Here I  draw particularly on findings from across the ethnography, including a biographical mapping exercise. The biographical mapping tool was devised as a low-​tech and accessible way to gather different types of data about participants’ lives, going beyond field notes or participants’ presentations of themselves. While ethnographic observations, taped discussions and photography gathered lots of rich data about their everyday lives in and with austerity, I  wanted to learn a little more about the life experiences that had shaped participants’ current situations and their future ideals. Participatory methods fit

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well with ethnographic research and can be used as a way to readdress the power dynamics that situate participants as being ‘researched’ (Pain 2004: 652) rather than as actively involved in research (also see Kesby et al 2005; Hörschelmann 2011). They are also ‘well suited to relational knowledge creation’ (Hopkins and Pain 2007: 291). The idea for including the biographical mapping tool within the ethnography was inspired by recent geographical studies on youth transitions that have employed similar methods. Worth (2009: 1050), for instance, advocates the use of life mapping techniques in order ‘to capture the messiness of becoming, seeing transition through the scale of a life and important life events’. There are also ethical advantages to using mapping as opposed to talking methods, as Worth (2009: 1053) also found with her participants: ‘some issues that were too difficult to talk about … were mapped rather than talked about’. Day (2014:  199) developed a similar method to enable young people to map their own biographical timelines, as ‘an opportunity to provide a visual account of their lives’. By using biographical mapping methods I also wanted to explore innovative forms of data collection, as well as to encourage participants to reflect upon socio-​economic change and continuity across their lives in the context of my research on austerity (also see Hörschelmann 2011). The tool consists of a set of basic materials: five acetate sheets fastened together so that they layer up. It is accompanied by some broad prompting questions, and the conversation is taped. It involves participants mapping their life and the events in it in different layers to build up a whole picture. On the first sheet, at the bottom of the stack, they are asked to draw a line to represent their life and to mark on it the important events in their life. On the second, they are asked to mark the important events in their life that have happened to other people, and on the third to note anything else significant going on in the background. The final two stages, sheets four and five, involve mapping what they think their future will look like, and what they would like it to

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look like. The prompts were left deliberately vague so as to be open to interpretation and to allow for participants to take the task in a direction that suited them. Moreover, I introduced the tool to participants only after I had got to know them and had developed a rapport with them. After piloting the tool with my own friends and family, I found that it would involve divulging a lot of private information, and all at once. As the findings below confirm, the method can indeed be rather revealing of people’s personal and relational lives, resulting in lots of rich and sometimes complicated details (Worth 2009; Hall 2014). For this reason, and like Valentine (2007: 15), I have chosen to present findings using a vignette approach, ‘to highlight, through a set of stories … particular spatial and temporal moments’. Findings on relational biographies and linked lives: family, home and care in austerity In what follows I  use three vignettes, each from a different person and perspective, to explore and illustrate the idea of relational biographies and their role in times of austerity. A vignette approach is often used in research such as this, when layers and complexity are involved in empirical examples, as a way to strip back on quantity and instead provide quality, detailed analysis (see Valentine 2007). Each subsection is titled according to the pseudonym of the participant, and some details have been changed to protect their identities. My aim is to provide reflection on ethnographic and biographical stories around family, home and care in austerity –​all of which are tightly interwoven  –​as well as the process of tracing these methodologically. Kerry

Kerry was one of the first people I met as part of the ethnographic research. She was with her youngest son, Zack, at a morning

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playgroup session that was being held in a local church hall. Though relatively quiet and reserved at this first encounter, I got to know Kerry over the course of 15 months as a warm, open and thoughtful person. Kerry was a stay-​at-​home mum in her late twenties, living with her partner Dan and four young sons. They lived in a privately rented three-​bedroom house relatively close to the centre of ‘Argleton’ where most of their immediate family also lived, and Dan worked as a mechanic nearby. Kerry and Dan got married during the time they took part in the research. Although I met Dan on a number of occasions, the family’s participation was largely led and mediated by Kerry. We often met on weekdays, when Dan was working and the kids were at school. Kerry would tell me she enjoyed the adult company. Kerry was the first participant to try out the biographical mapping task, in part because her family was one of the first to be recruited –​I had already known her for a year by this point. Also, in hindsight, it was probably also because I felt particularly comfortable introducing her to the tool, knowing she would be open to trying the task and honest about what did or did not work. I headed over to her house one afternoon in October 2014, armed with biscuits and stationery. Zack, now two years old, was home too, having been at the playgroup session in the morning. As I walked down the road and towards their house I  was greeted with a loud “Saa-​waah” at the door  –​one of the pleasures of longitudinal research with families is watching young children grow and learn to talk. After a cup of tea and chat about the preceding three weeks since we’d last met, I asked Kerry if she would mind trying out the tool for me, and if I could tape the conversation. We usually stood in the kitchen or sat in the living room on the sofa when I was over at her house, but the acetate was a bit flimsy so Kerry thought it best if we sat at the dining table. Zack pegged it over to the table when he saw the pens, jumped up onto a chair and was poised ready to draw. I hadn’t thought about entertaining

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him while Kerry was talking and drawing –​an oversight on my part, but also a reminder of the invisibility of everyday care and the ways in which fieldwork can be a form of care work (Hall 2018a). Luckily Zack was quite taken with the acetate, a relic of university teaching now relegated to the bottom shelf of my department’s stationery cupboard. I took out two of the toolkits, one for Kerry and one for Zack, and placed the pens on the table. It soon became clear that the acetate wasn’t the only redundant material. It took three pens for Kerry to get going with drawing a timeline on the first sheet. “Is it working?” I asked apologetically, as captured on the transcript. “Sorry. All of the pens have dried out in the department. I’ll throw that one away.” On the first sheet, when asked to note “the most important events in your life and when they happened”, Kerry’s first responses were her wedding anniversary and each of her sons’ birth dates. These were no-​brainers for Kerry, which she instinctively jotted down on the timeline after an initial apprehensive ‘short silence’ documented in the transcript and my field diary. Similarly, the next layer of the tool, for “important events in your life that have affected you but have happened to other people”, Kerry’s immediate reaction was “when grandma and granddad died … My parents split up”. While the first two questions are actually very similar, I suspected they would provoke different responses. The second question, about events that have affected one personally but that happened to other people, might suggest a lack of agency or control, a distancing from the immediate impact. And yet both resulted in answers about vital life events, cornerstone moments in family life: birth, death, marriage, divorce ( Johnson-​Hanks 2002; McKie et al 2002; Alber 2016). Home, care and family were here positioned as key sites of subjectivity and emotional life. For Kerry the questions also raised complex issues about family, home life and shared living, even though they had not been explicitly asked about –​the knottiness of everyday life shown

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in how different experiences and emotions are interwoven in biographies. When talking about her parent’s divorce, she said that it was “better because then [her parents] weren’t arguing”. But when her dad moved out, her step-​dad moved in. He and Kerry “clashed”. Her older sister was more fortunate:  “she moved out quite young” to be away from the arguing. I had known about her parents getting divorced but not about her relationship with her step-​dad in those earlier years, or about her sister moving out of home, aged 16. Recalling this in the context of the task meant that I was given an insight into Kerry’s life in similar ways to traditional biographical interviewing methods (see Worth 2009). Furthermore, upon reflection, I  thought about how understandings and experiences of home, family and care are altered by austerity policies. Many young adults today have to either continue or return to live with their parents as a result of changes in housing benefit, out-​of-​reach rental markets and the proliferation of precarious employment contracts (Heath and Calvert 2013; Pimlott-W ​ ilson 2017; Wilkinson and Ortega-​ Alcázar 2017). Marriage breakdowns and intergenerational, step-​kinship tensions, like those Kerry describes, are part of the often prickly personal politics of austerity as they are lived, and are likely to be exacerbated by them (Hall 2018a). For the next part of the task, a layer of other significant things happening in the background, Kerry sat quietly for a few moments before asking “How the hell do you spell government?” It turns out that Kerry had received a grant of £1,000 when she was pregnant with twins, again a piece of information she had not disclosed before, and about which I had never asked. She explained: It was five hundred pounds per pregnancy. Because I was pregnant with two I  got a grand, and the only reason I qualified for it at the time was because Bradley [her first son] was under one and the Child Benefits … years ago, when you had a child under one you got more benefits.

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They’ve changed it now, so all your children get the same, no matter how old they are. But because they were all under one at the time I was able to claim for that, so I got a government grant. … I bought stuff for the kids with it, cots and clothes. Receiving this grant clearly made a significant impact on Kerry’s life at a time when she had three very young children to care for. Again, it brought to light how specific cuts to welfare, including child tax credits, that have since occurred in a relatively short period of time, directly impacted on Kerry’s family and home life. Kerry used the grant to buy items for her children that were a necessary part of their care and well-​being. The plaited threads of linked lives (Elder 1994) were revealed not only in connections to other kin, but also to broader socio-​economic and generational changes (see Camfield 2011; Leach et al 2013). With the next layer of the tool, the role of welfare provision and the space of the home (and connections to family) moved from a subtlety in Kerry’s biographical map to centre stage. When asked “how you think your future will be, the things that you think will happen”, Kerry scribbled down “Zack going to nursery” straightaway. Entitlement to free childcare would make a big difference to Kerry, with Zack being looked after for three afternoons a week, or 15 hours in total. This would free her up for another important caring responsibility: “June, I get my nephew.” Kerry’s sister and her partner could not afford childcare for their newborn baby, and both would eventually need to work full time. When her sister returned to work, Kerry was going to take care of her nephew during the week. She would be paid cash in hand, and for a fee much lower than a childminder would charge. Where they were living during this time also came up in talk about the future, with Kerry explaining: “I think we’ll move, but where? That’s the question. We want to stay in the catchment, near school. I’d like to win the lottery, I think I’ll win the lottery.” Housing decisions and opportunities (or the lack

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thereof) were shown to be intimately interwoven with family and care responsibilities (Henwood et al 2010; Smith 2011; Hall 2018a). The gendered dimensions of home and work were also very much part of how Kerry identified and described her role in her family and society at large: “I can’t imagine going back to work any time soon unless I win the lottery. Stay at home.” Meanings of home, family and care can be changed in austerity, perhaps confirmed as oppressive and restrictive, depending on personal biographies. Meanwhile Zack scribbled away, turning the acetate each time his mum did, drawing a new masterpiece on the blank plastic page. He was as much a part of the discussion as Kerry, whether he was talking to us or we were talking to him, gesturing, smiling, sharing the space of the activity with us –​even if he did end up with pen marks on his ear and all over the kitchen tablecloth. Zoe

As with Kerry, I  met Zoe at a mother and toddler session, although this was on the other side of town and Zoe was running the group. She had been persuaded by the other mums to stay in the role even after her two children had begun school because she was so good at it: bubbly, welcoming and organised. This was my first impression of Zoe, and it was a lasting one, although throughout the fieldwork I  came to see a more vulnerable, sensitive side to her, in spite of her cheery exterior. Zoe and her husband Stuart were both in their late thirties and lived in their own home with their two young children, Isobel (aged nine) and Ryan (aged seven). Stuart worked full time in a construction business that he part-​owned and Zoe worked in a few different part-​time jobs over the course of the research, as well as studying for a non-​teaching assistant qualification and being Ryan’s primary carer. Ryan has a life-​limiting illness and is considered disabled, in medical terms and as far as the state is concerned.

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They had been a part of the research for over a year when I asked them to try out the biography mapping task. As with Kerry, I would usually see Zoe in the daytime on weekdays, when Stuart was working. On a cold February morning in 2015 I turned up at their house. I hadn’t seen Zoe since before Christmas and we had a lot to catch up on. After a cup of tea, we settled in the living room and got going with the task. Zoe had her legs curled up by her on the sofa, and I was sat in an armchair facing her. She was cosy, she said, so rather than us move to the kitchen worktop or dining table, she pulled a nest of coffee tables towards her, settling on the smallest to lean on. This was ergonomically awkward  –​the acetate kept flipping over as she tried to draw the line on the first sheet. “Do you want me to put my cup on there to hold it?” I offered. “No, no, it’s fine. I’m alright,” Zoe insisted, writing with one hand and using the other to steady the pack. For the first part of the task, Zoe noted down ‘typical’ vital events as the important moments in her life (see Johnson-​Hanks 2002), which were especially family oriented, though she took her time in recalling these: “I’m just trying to think back, right to the … so I was … so that would be … university … Twenty-​ one, first job. And then I was twenty-​six … then thirty … first child … thirty-​two … second child … and when I retrained.” The transcript records some of the pauses for thought and the partial sentences, and in my field diary I noted how Zoe spent a lot of time scrunching up her face, her eyes closed and her mind running through a chronology of life events in front of me. In writing about and recalling these, she ordered them by age, noting personal, familial and relational events as they fitted into an age-​marked biography of her life as she remembered it (see Hopkins and Pain 2007 for a discussion of age as relational). The second part of the tool was similarly remembered according to age, as well as periods of time, or what Zoe described as “a very, very condensed period, from the age of about thirty-​two, that I would probably need to add more detail

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to”. This also highlighted difficulties with the tool in that it does not allow participants to ‘zoom in’ on time periods by providing them with the space to write down everything they wanted to (see Worth 2009). Here, the tool again brought out details I had only partial or no knowledge of, and I was certainly not aware that these things had happened around the same time. For Zoe, some of this recalling was “quite hard, actually” (also see Day 2014). I assured her that we could stop at any time, but at this point she was deeply involved, counting on her fingers the years, while speaking about this condensing of events: Zoe:

So I was pregnant with Ryan … my mum was diagnosed … then my auntie tried to kill herself. Sarah: Goodness. All in that period? Zoe: Oh, it goes on. Sarah: I knew that there were … yeah. I didn’t realise it was such … Zoe: Ryan born and diagnosed …   [Silence] Zoe: Dad had a kidney transplant … Post-​n atal depression … That was probably the worst period. Sarah: Yeah? Zoe: Yeah. In a short space of time. There was a sense that the time period Zoe referred to was condensed not only because of the number of things happening “in a short space of time”, but also how life at the time felt–​ compressed by multiple traumatic events and bad memories, a sort of ‘lived time’ rather than ‘clock time’ (see Bailey 2009). This only came to light when she was asked to narrate her biography. Zoe’s (memory of) life in her mid-​thirties is marked, marred even, by specific events that serve to punctuate her biographical story. Likewise, they are simultaneously personal and relational biographies (Smart 2007; Heaphy et al 2013), always involving close family members and care relations.

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Moreover, and as with Kerry, discussions of the future brought to light how these personal, familial and relational biographies are interwoven with experiences and imaginaries of home, care and austerity, including how they are narrated and imagined: Well I think that we will move in the next … so right now I’m here, I’m thirty-​nine. My fortieth, that’s a big important milestone for me. I think in the next two years we will move house. Erm … [short silence] I think I’m going to put here, when I’m forty, a review of Ryan’s benefits. Because that will impact on … if we lose those then I might go to working more hours. Questions about the future instinctively led to thoughts and conversations about home-​based family care responsibilities, balanced alongside paid work and benefits changes under austerity. In this case it was disability benefits as they related to her son Ryan and to Zoe’s role as his carer. These changes would therefore also have a domino effect on where they lived, making moving house less affordable and less pressing if their benefits and income were to change. These were not easy topics to discuss. Uncertainty, expectations, shattered or unfulfilled dreams were a large part of these conversations. I  think this is because talking about lifecourses and biographies involves people thinking about the only certain life event –​death. In talking about their lives, people ultimately also thought about where their lives were leading and would end. Zoe was open about this when asked how she found using the tool: I’m the kind of person that lives in the moment. I’m not a big one for thinking too far into the future. … I don’t like to think of myself as an older me, but I am also very frightened of dying so I don’t want to think too far ahead, if I  was to think about, because then I’d have to think

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“Well, what if I don’t get to seventy or eighty? What if there isn’t that kind of future for me, or somebody I care about?” So I don’t like to think … I know that’s probably not a very rational thought. While talking about personal and linked biographies, the process of completing the biographical task was also very personal for another reason. It was as much about how participants reflected the type of person they were, the performance of their talk and the task, how they saw and presented their lives –​to me and to themselves. Here Zoe stressed that she was the “kind of person that lives in the moment”, and yet the practice of completing the tool revealed that she had clearly thought a lot about the future. This again reminded me of Gillis’s (1996: xv) idea of the families we live with and by, ‘representing ourselves to ourselves as we would like to think we are’. Zoe seemed to be comfortable with ‘the future’ being a flitting thought, an internal conversation. But when it was released into the world, spoken and written about, when she was asked to dwell on it and offer a view, it became too overwhelming –​perhaps too real. Family, home and care in austerity also therefore become vulnerable to change as lived imaginaries and realities. Selma

I met Selma through one of her friends at a local school group for parents. Selma’s eight-​year-​old daughter, Mya, had been at the school for a few years, enrolling when they moved to the area. Selma was a single mum in her mid-​thirties, living with Mya in social housing, a two-​bedroom flat near the school. Selma was looking for work, but was struggling to find something to fit around caring for Mya, which meant that they were completely financially dependent on social security. They took part in the research for eight months, during which time I got to know Selma well. She was very family oriented, and clearly missed her

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mum and dad who were living in Iran. She had a cousin who lived in London, whom she and Mya would visit once every few months, returning with small trinkets and furnishings for the flat to make it feel more homely. Their home was a common topic of conversation because Selma was really unhappy living there. The flat was sparse, with relatively plain decor which she described as small, uncomfortable and grotty, though she was unable to afford anything else because of her limited income and housing benefits. Any money she did have was spent on the house: “everything I buy here is for this home, not for me … I need to buy everything myself, council houses come with nothing.” Mya hated where they lived too. This was made worse after one of her school friends said she no longer wanted to visit because their house was horrible. Mya cried over this, as did Selma, who was at a loss because there was very little she could do to change the situation. This vignette is substantially shorter than the proceeding two because Selma was never able to complete the biographical tool. I turned up to her house one day in October 2014, when we had arranged for her to try it out. I had the toolkit on the table and we had started talking, but had to stop the recording when there was a knock on the door. The housing association had sent two workmen round to look at Selma’s shower and the bathroom light. She asked me to stay during their visit, convinced that they were going to leave them broken as they had been for the last few months, and wanted me to encourage them to fix them there and then. We’d had a conversation a few months before about the odd jobs we had undertaken when we were younger, and I mentioned that I had worked at a letting agent for a short time. Selma had remembered this, saying that she thought this experience would come in handy in communicating with the workmen. My biography is here being recalled and entwined with the story I was telling about Selma, an instance of relational biographies (also see Hall 2017). While the workmen were talking in the bathroom, Selma told me, in hushed tones, that

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the last time they came she felt fobbed off, and thought they didn’t take her seriously because she was “a brown woman with a foreign accent”. The shower was fixed that day –​and Selma kept thanking me –​but my role was relatively minimal, albeit a reminder of how researchers can become woven into the everyday fabric of participants’ lives (Hall 2017). We agreed to meet another time soon to finish our conversation and to try the tool, but after struggling to find a date it became clear that Selma was juggling too many responsibilities. Mya had recently been diagnosed with a number of relatively serious health and behavioural conditions, and while she was at school Selma was spending her time chasing appointments, collecting prescriptions, meeting with the school, searching for a job, attending a college course and staying on top of housework. She called me to fill me in, and sounded exhausted. In the end, it all became too much and she withdrew from the research. The very issues I wanted to explore as part of the research –​how family, personal biographies, home life, social relationships and care responsibilities are affected by austerity  –​were knotted within the precise reasons Selma had to withdraw. Concluding reflections The three vignettes discussed here, revolving around ethnographic encounters and the experience of using a biographical mapping tool, all present the knottiness of family, home and care, as they are interwoven with one another and within people’s personal and relational biographies. When asked to talk about their lives, the events in them and their future aspirations, participants identified how their home life, family relationships and care responsibilities were impacted by cuts and changes under austerity, from the subtle to the extreme. This was in regard to both the stories they told me and the stories they told and represented to themselves –​the memories and imaginaries of family, home and care that were palatable. These

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knotty stories were also, for the most part, unprovoked by the vague questioning within the tool, and yet participants spoke about many similar issues. Cuts to childcare, the lack of job opportunities, local housing markets under pressure, additional caring responsibilities –​and the anxieties these created –​were all part of their personal stories of austerity, highlighting the spatial, relational and emotional entanglements of home, family and care. Throughout, these biographical tales were always relational, involving family and friends, generational and social expectations, and even enveloped in me, as a researcher. This suggests that, in order to really understanding how austerity impacts on everyday life, researchers need to find ways to move beyond individualised voices. Shared and relational stories sit very close to the surface and can, with relatively little prompting, emerge as complex, meaningful narratives, whether written or spoken. Furthermore, biographical mapping was a new technique for me going into this research, and through this process I have some observations to make on methodology too. In terms of engagement with the tool, participants all took part in the task willingly and said they enjoyed it. But the last stage, mapping the future, was something that they were clearly unfamiliar with. They said that they did not like thinking so far ahead, that it was scary, like somehow tempting fate. It involved them thinking about something they would rather not think about: their own mortality and the unknown. In many ways, research can end up revealing participants to themselves (Hall 2014), and the biographical tool is one clear example of where this can occur (also see Worth 2009; Day 2014). The tool also highlighted the gendered work of taking part in research: all three vignettes focus on female participants, all of whom led the involvement of their families. This was a responsibility that, for some, added to an already heavy (care) load and therefore calls into question the ethics and gendered inequalities of in-​depth qualitative work.

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There is some way to go in developing biographical mapping tools in ways that allow for data to be captured on social and generational changes, but here I have made some steps towards this goal. For, while participants did speak about their everyday lives, relationships and practices in regard to family, home and care, there was an underlying sense of how these biographies seemed even more relational as a result of austerity. Austerity cuts were reshaping their everyday relationships and the imaginaries of personal biographies, including where and with whom they would live, their intergenerational and familial caring responsibilities and fluxes in income, welfare and employment. This also highlights the ways in which home, family and care are themselves interwoven in the tapestries of everyday relationships, spaces and practices, their meaning and form open to change and contestation in a time of austerity. Moreover, the changes and challenges faced by participants were by no means particular or individualised but were shared across family, friends and generations. In this way, biographical mapping offers possibilities as a political tool, a means of connecting personal stories to political change. How this might happen is beyond the scope of this chapter, but it is a challenge I pose to myself and to researchers working in this field. Such biographical stories of the complexity of everyday life in austerity are incomplete without reference to these socially as well as personally relational transformations.

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FIVE Spaces of care beyond the home: austerity and children’s services Eleanor Jupp

Introduction This chapter, along with others in the book, considers care and its links both to the domestic spaces of the home and to the concerns and policies of the welfare state. This takes us into complex political terrain that includes questions of public and private lives, gender and intersectional inequalities, and the different ways in which care is taken into governance and policy regimes. Running through this terrain is a question about how forms of ‘care’, as embodied, gendered and everyday labour that often takes place within domestic space, should be of concern to the state and in what ways. Policy prescriptions to address concerns over care in recent years in the UK have ranged from funding for paid childcare, thus ‘supporting’ mothers into the sphere of paid employment (MacLeavy 2007), to promoting care services as ‘personalised’ or ‘co-​produced’ with recipients (Needham 2008), to seeking to shape the forms of care undertaken within ‘parenting’ through interventions around, for example, healthy eating and exercise

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(Colls and Evans 2008). As other chapters in this book show, such interventions potentially reshape the boundaries between the home space and the welfare state in a range of ways, often with rather ambivalent outcomes. The state may be experienced both as overly involved and controlling in matters of care (as in the examples about parenting), but also potentially as absent, neglectful and not involved enough (as in approaches to childcare). This chapter focuses on Sure Start Children’s Centres, as spaces that provide examples of some of the progressive ways in which public services might be involved in matters of care and domestic lives, ways that are perhaps often overlooked within critical commentaries. However, I argue that austerity cuts are shifting the politics of care surrounding the centres. As the threat of cuts and closures are brought to bear on the centres, a complex web of caring relations is made visible around the centres between parents, children and staff, relations which are fundamentally under threat as centres close. The first part of the chapter outlines some key debates around home, care, public services and austerity. I then go on to consider Sure Start Children’s Centres as spaces of care and the ways in which these forms of care are being threatened by austerity cuts, and why this matters for the everyday lives of women. The welfare state, care and austerity Nancy Fraser (2016), in a far-​reaching analysis of recent history in the USA and other comparable contexts, has argued that shifting forms of capitalism, the welfare state and caring labour (or ‘social reproduction’ as she terms it) have resulted in a series of settlements between these aspects of society, settlements which have not necessarily improved women’s everyday lives. She sees the founding of the contemporary welfare state as a moment in which women’s caring labour was institutionalised within the home: paid work within the capitalist economy was

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to be undertaken by men earning a ‘family wage’ that confined women to the home to undertake care work. More recent shifts, however, have pushed women out of the home into paid work in the dual-​income household model, which means that care has become commodified and outsourced to other women, working for low pay and at a cost to their ability to care for their own families. Fraser argues that various ‘technical fixes’ have been proposed to overcome the ‘contradictions’ that arise between care, capitalism and the welfare state. For example, she discusses breast bumps and technologies of breastfeeding available to women working in corporate jobs in the USA (where there is very little entitlement to paid maternity leave). While seeming to promote ‘flexible working’, which enables women to undertake both caring labour (albeit at a distance) and paid work, Fraser argues that essentially such ‘fixes’ promote the march of neoliberal capitalism while systematically devaluing care. This essay sits alongside her recent critique of feminism (Fraser 2013), which she sees as complicit in these shifts, through promoting superficial versions of empowerment that bolster neoliberalism and fail to address the collective issues of welfare and care that remain central to women’s lives (see Chapter Two). Fraser’s argument therefore suggests that the welfare state continues to evade the real responsibility for care, despite its rhetoric of gender equality. Care continues to be undertaken by women either within their own home or commodified within the homes of others or in privatised institutions, while the state overall promotes neoliberal capitalism. In this chapter I want to argue that this perhaps does not tell the whole story of the orientation of the welfare state to care. Through various kinds of policy experiments and programmes, both long-standing and more recent, welfare services can and do provide spaces of care  –​not just commodified forms of childcare or for other groups, but also care among carers, those being cared for and state professionals ( Jupp 2013). As Newman (2012) argues in relation to Fraser’s analysis of the complicity between

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feminism and neoliberalism, there is a danger in glossing over the differentiated nature of strands of feminist thought, as well as the differentiated nature of the welfare state and the forms of care that might emerge from it. While not denying the validity of Fraser’s insights, it may also be possible to imagine a more radical politics of care within and through the spaces of public service provision (Barnes and Prior 2009). Such imaginings require a different orientation to care that not only sees it as ‘unwaged labour’ but also as producing radical forms of empathy, community and connection across difference (Lawson 2007). Therefore, as Emejulu and Bassel (2018: 9) argue in relation to women of colour in particular, there is a need not only to think critically about how care as a category in policy can subordinate and repress women, but also to think more hopefully about care as resistance and political agency: ‘Care is a double-​ edged sword of domination and resistance. Care is a politics of becoming.’ Their focus is very much on care as it moves through anti-​austerity projects and activism, while my argument here is that it is also possible to see this politics of care within the spaces of state provision. Such orientations and practices may be functioning as overtly resistant to policy discourses (Barnes and Prior 2009) or may be entangled within the inevitably hybrid and contradictory assemblages of practices, policies and programmes that make up governance (Li 2007). As I go on to demonstrate, Sure Start Children’s Centres can be viewed as sites that produce quite complex geographies of care and that demonstrate the important and progressive role that public services can play in extending care beyond the home spaces. In exploring these spaces below, I therefore consider more broadly the potentials for the state to enable such spaces of care and how they might relate to wider questions of the nature and democratic purpose of public services and spaces. However, I  agree with Emejulu and Bassel (2018) that the ‘place’ of care is shifting with austerity (Hall and Power

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2018). Public sector workers and particular organisations may be resisting funding and programme cuts with new practices and ethics of care (Morse and Munro 2018). Yet the reality is that decreased capacity and funding inevitably has a detrimental impact on the ability of public sector workers and services to engage in sustained and meaningful caring relationships with service users (Clayton et al 2015). Public sector workers, from youth workers (Horton 2016) to social workers (Featherstone et  al 2018) may have less time and emotional capacity to care, as they are potentially exhausted and drained by the cuts and pressures wrought on services by austerity (Hitchen 2016). Furthermore, I also wish to argue that with austerity comes not just less capacity and fewer resources to care, but also new ideologies and politics of care that shift the emphasis and orientations of many services. For example, retreating from widespread concern to support families in need of care, new rationalities of services move to a focus only on what Emejulu and Bassel (2018) call ‘failed care’:  households that require ‘interventions’ in order to avoid risks to children and vulnerable groups, and indeed risks to the reputations of welfare services. These debates have perhaps been particularly acute within social work (Featherstone et  al 2018), which navigates this emotionally complex terrain of the potential abuse and neglect of children and others (Warner 2013), and has arguably become increasingly focused on avoiding risk rather than on providing care and support for families. Outside social work too, there is an increased emphasis on ‘targeted interventions’ aimed at those ‘most in need’, although such interventions may be experienced more as controlling than as caring for needs (Edwards et  al 2016). As the rest of this chapter will show, austerity cuts to the Sure Start Children’s Centres programme have combined with these new or at least increasingly prominent rationalities around children’s services to move the emphasis away from everyday caring relationships. Within the research outlined below, many

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of those left working within such services (although many have lost their jobs) have been experiencing a kind of existential crisis about the purposes and practices that form their professional identities. This new ‘politics of care’ therefore seeks to rework the links between families and their domestic spaces and the welfare state. Researching shifting geographies of home, care and Sure Start Children’s Centres The discussion below draws on two waves of research I undertook, initially in 2010–​2012 and recently 2017–​2018, both focusing on Sure Start Children’s Centres. Sure Start Children’s Centres were set up by the UK Labour government from 1997 onwards (Eisenstadt 2011). Through development via a number of phases, the programme established neighbourhood centres providing ‘drop-​in play’ and other informal spaces such as cafes, as well as a range of health, education and other forms of support for children under five and their parents. The centres were designed to be easily accessible to local communities, with the idea of ‘pram-​pushing distance’ as a key principle. The programme has been seen as part of a ‘social investment state’ approach to welfare services (Lister 2006) which prioritises spending in the ‘early years’ as a way of improving outcomes (and thus saving money) in later life. As such it has been criticised (Lister 2003b) for viewing young children as ‘citizens-​workers in becoming’, shaping subjectivities around aspirations such as school –​and work –​readiness rather than necessarily supporting needs in the here and now. Nonetheless, my earlier research also found the centres to be sites of sometimes subversive cultures of care ( Jupp 2013), whereby workers and centres users developed more far-​reaching and supportive interactions and relationships that potentially went beyond the instrumentality that such a critique implies. In this sense, the ‘social investment’ state, certainly compared

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to the ‘austerity state’ which has arguably replaced it, did frame spaces and identifications that were experienced as nurturing and empathetic within the here and now. In the section that follows I focus on how centres both provided and supported care, framing a space beyond the domestic sphere. My research took place in two local authority areas in south-​ east England, both of which have seen significant cuts and service reductions, which have been the focus of my most recent research project. This project examined community activism and governance under austerity in relation to the centres, particularly from the perspectives of service users, and the empirical data below all comes from this recent project. In both local authority areas, Children’s Centre services were moving towards a new ‘model’ of services, which involved shutting the vast majority of centres, and redesignating remaining centres as ‘Family Hubs’, supposedly serving wider areas and offering more services. Such changes are widespread across England, with an estimated 1,000 centres shutting since 2010 (Smith et al 2018). Many service users were therefore very anxious about the stretching of the geographies which surrounded access to the centres, the loss of the ‘pram-​pushing distance’ that linked the home space to the spaces of the centres. However, less visible in the debates surrounding service cuts was a narrowing of eligibility or access to services at the new hubs: most if not all services were to be ‘targeted’, meaning that, even if physical access were possible, parents would not necessarily be eligible to attend the groups and services offered. This hugely significant shift was somewhat glossed over within proposals put forward by the local authorities. The shift was often justified in terms of focusing on families ‘most in need’. As Smith et al (2018) point out, this change marks a redefinition of need:  many neighbourhoods where existing centres were located could arguably be seen as places where all families were ‘in need’. However, new definitions of need tied into the language of ‘intervention’ and individualised problem solving signalled

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above: families were understood to ‘need’ interventions rather than, for example, access to resources such as toys and books, free activities and the cheap healthy food that centres tended to provide. Despite this shift being rather hidden, service users were aware that there would be a shift away from the relaxed and welcoming environments that the centres offered at the time. More visible within the policy discussions was a move towards more support for parents ‘at home’. Both local authorities argued that, in closing the centres, they were moving towards a more ‘flexible’ service, whereby, rather than support being based in centres (as one consultation document put it, deliberately critically, ‘council buildings’), support would be available (to at least some parents) in a range of settings, ‘in the community’, via the notion of ‘satellite’ settings where services might be offered, but also within people’s own homes. A theme that emerged from the interviews was therefore the existing Children’s Centres as sites for a particular set of caring relations, which could not be replicated within the proposed new models. For me as a researcher, obtaining these rich insights into the landscapes of care surrounding the centres had a poignant and paradoxical quality as they moved towards processes of closure (see Robinson and Sheldon 2018). While I intervened in both local and national debates about the future of Children’s Centres as far as I could, ultimately, in both local authority areas, the existing centres did close. Nonetheless, while not seeking to celebrate the politics of austerity, I do view these moments when services are under pressure as ‘making visible’ how everyday lives are entangled with the welfare state and indeed potentially frame new enactments of citizenship based on care (Erel 2018), the home ( Jupp 2017) and other gendered practices and spaces, a point I shall return to in the conclusion to the chapter. During the research I  undertook 12 interviews with professionals and service users, and also followed, and to an extent participated in, activism to resist closures involving

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protests and demonstrations in public spaces, and attending and speaking at public and council meetings at a range of scales. Interviews undertaken with service users at this time focused on the value of Children’s Centres to their everyday lives, values that came into sharp focus as the threat of cuts hung over the centres. Service users who came forward at this time to speak at public meetings, participate in activism or take part in my research were often motivated by a sense that the council, who were taking decisions about the future of the centres, did not understand the value of the centres. The idea of ‘story-​telling’ was evident and important within the campaigns, both within meetings and at protests, as well as online (Raynor 2017). Therefore when undertaking interviews I used an unstructured approach to allow service users to tell such stories in whatever way they chose. I also used the stories to produce a digital animation to make their experiences available to a wider public.1 The eight service users who took part in the research were all women, mothers of young children, and were all white British. Around half of them identified themselves as having a mental health condition, predominantly postnatal depression, associated with the transition to motherhood. Pseudonyms are used in the interview quotes. Closeness and distance from the home space So what were the aspects of the existing centres that were particularly valued by service users? One element was the centres as both proximate (i.e., easy to access) but also separate from the home space, where care for babies and young children took place. Caring for young children/​babies emerged from the accounts of interviewees as an intense and relentless series of repetitive practices, including feeding, nappy changing and sleeping, which the mothers associated with feelings of loss of control and identity. The home space, and such practices of care within it, were often evoked as confining and claustrophobic.

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This was particularly the case in the accounts of mothers who identified themselves as suffering from postnatal depression or anxiety. A visit to the Children’s Centre offered them a break from such a repetitive rhythm: Your day, when your children are that young just revolves around –​when they need to sleep next, when they need to eat next, are they clean, are they washed –​it’s just –​it’s nice to be able to take a break. (Claire) Escaping in both space and time from these home-​based practices was recognised as beneficial, and a visit to the Children’s Centres offered an ‘excuse’ or impetus to leave the home space with the baby or young children, often a difficult and daunting task in itself: actually, it’s not good for you to be in four walls all the time, or your children, but you need an excuse to leave them sometimes, and I mean that’s the thing with them being in walking distance is that actually when you are feeling low, or shattered, or recovering from post-​natal, you need to be able to walk, you need to be able to get there easily. (Hannah) The journey to the centre became part of its value for both parents and children. Linda suffered from a rare health condition which made it very hard for her to leave the house, but she was supported to do so by centre staff. This made her journey particularly meaningful to her, enabling her to experience wider feelings of participation and belonging: So to be able to walk down, with the pram, is amazing … to get out in the fresh air as well, to have that walk, to talk to other people on the way there and back, maybe pop to the park afterwards with people from the session.

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In terms of benefits once at the centre, although some interviewees mentioned particular activities (such as music, feeding advice sessions), most parents saw care-​full interactions with other adults, both professionals and other service users, as the main benefit of the centres ( Jupp 2013). Such interactions could be at the most basic level: if you are having one of the days where you just don’t know what to do … and they are just being a little terror, and you just need someone to … even for five minutes … just go and play with your baby, just talk to you. (Hannah) It gets quite lonely being on your own, at home, with a small person that only asks for food and sleep and nappies, and you don’t get much back from that, when they’re that small, so just being able to go and talk to another human being, and getting a response is quite nice. (Katie) Friendship, inclusion and belonging Such interactions could, over time, lead to a key benefit of the centres as perceived by service users: the forming of friendships which was talked about as absolutely crucial in getting by as a new parent. Again the centres, as somewhere away from the home, were seen to provide an environment which enabled parents to form friendships and to socialise over time, in a way that would have been more difficult if parents had been meeting in homes. While new parents might feel confined to the home with young children, they may also find it difficult to invite others over (see Chapter Three), for reasons that are linked to (gendered) norms of whether the house is clean and tidy enough, something that is often very difficult to achieve when caring for a baby. As Claire put it, mothers may want to feel that their house is ‘reasonable’ before inviting others round, and this is unlikely to be the case after they have given birth.

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Therefore the centres provided a ‘home-​like’ (Wilson et al 2012) space that mothers did not have to feel responsible for tidying and cleaning: You don’t necessarily want people to come round your house after your baby’s born  –​or you at least want to feel your house is reasonable, and that’s not necessarily the case. (Claire) Similarly, the centres were also identified as places where friendly and ongoing caring relationships with professionals could be formed. As noted above, while new models being proposed suggested a role for more home visiting and services or support delivered ‘in the home’, this was not a move which was generally welcomed when it was discussed at council meetings and consultation events about the new service. Again this tied into (gendered) fears of judgement about how the home environment might be viewed by a visiting professional, which was in turn linked to an ultimate fear about the power of the state to intervene in families (Featherstone et al 2018). Hannah described her feelings about such ‘home visiting’: you worry about being judged, it’s horrible … I would have hated people coming into me … once you’ve got professionals involved … people worry that they’re going to have their children taken away and things like that. She contrasted the sets of interactions suggested by the home-​visiting approach with what she felt were ongoing and supportive, caring interactions offered through relationships with professionals within Children’s Centres: Because you get to know the people, it’s like a critical supportive friend saying, maybe you need something, rather than someone official saying, there’s something

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wrong with your child, which is going to make a lot of people wary, when it’s just officialdom. Children’s Centres could therefore be seen as ‘enabling’ environments to support the development of interactions between service users and professionals in a range of ways (including between young children). Such interactions could be seen as valuable not only for providing care for parents and babies, but also for bringing people together around shared matters of concern. These might include connections across difference: It’s random, it’s the most random group of people that you will ever get … but … it’s actually really nice because it shows that you don’t have to have gone to school, or be the same religion or like the same music to be friends with people. (Claire) Extrapolating from Winnicott’s ideas about how parents or carers can provide such environments for children, Honig (2017) has used ideas of ‘enabling’ or ‘holding’ environments to consider the importance of ‘public things’, including spaces, services and a range of forms of ‘infrastructure’ (see also Hall 2018a). Bringing these ideas together with democratic theory, Honnig discusses how ‘public things’ might provide the material environments within which forms of inclusion, belonging, solidarity and ultimately democratic participation might be negotiated. Such a framing offers a way to consider the state not as directly controlling or as directing care, but as providing an environment that facilitates it, that enables citizens to participate in producing spaces of care. However, clearly within an environment such as a Children’s Centre, belonging and inclusion are not guaranteed. Indeed, the issue of inclusion across difference and who has access to the spaces became a matter of political debate around the closure of centres, with local authorities in both areas publicly proposing during debates about the closures that the centres had never been

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inclusive environments, tending to be ‘colonised’ by middle-​class parents. There was some evidence from an early evaluation of Sure Start that the most ‘disadvantaged’ parents were not using the centres (Belsky et al. 2007), and this finding was seized on to make political points a number of time over the past ten years to justify funding cuts. My own previous research ( Jupp 2013), where I  looked in more detail at friendships within centres found that, while they were not necessarily driven by class difference, friendship groups formed at centres could by their nature exclude others. Often groups of friends felt a particular connection or sense of belonging in relation to one centre and said that they would not feel the same way in other centres. Do such potential exclusions undermine the value of the centres? As Honig acknowledges in relation to ‘public things’ more broadly:  ‘public things … do not magically heal such (social) divisions or blind us to hierarchies’ (2017:  36). In relation to Children’s Centres in particular, the potential for such fragmentation points to the need for the active facilitation or orchestration of the caring environments of the centres by professional workers and, more broadly, to the role of the state in negotiating competing claims. Furthermore, a point strongly made by campaigners at a range of levels was that if, as was proposed, centres stopped being ‘universal’, then the narrowing of who was eligible to access such spaces could fundamentally change its purpose and its ethos. From the service users’ perspective it could become somewhere you were referred to after a (potentially stigmatising) ‘problem’ had been identified that required ‘intervention’–​as opposed to a public, open and collective space that in its very purpose acknowledged the need for all families to be given support and care. An existential crisis of care? This point about the difference between a freely available and accessible space offering friendship, respite and caring

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interactions and a service providing ‘interventions’ as solutions to problems for particular families highlights the fundamental shift in the rationalities of care surrounding the centres mentioned at the start of this chapter. This clash of perspectives in what it means to care, to provide support and to respond to ‘needs’ was very much evident when I was interviewing professionals working in existing services and within local authorities who had to implement austerity cuts. The following is a quote from a former Children’s Centre manager, now a primary headteacher. The ‘legislators’ referred to are the local authority officers introducing service cuts and reforms: I think you can never get across to legislators the difference between a place where you have to jump through incredibly high levels of thresholds to get any services and then the service is sparse and time limited, compared to a Children’s Centre where people walk through the door, experts in families and children under five are there on hand to gently encourage you in and keep offering a very informal, trustworthy level of support, there’s no comparison between that and a service where you have to fill in a huge form with everything about you on it in order to get any level of service. And then they say, well it’s an ‘intervention’. I’m allergic to the word actually. The issue of how families might ‘get through the door’, both metaphorically and materially, was also returned to at another point in this same interview, where she referred to ‘they’ again as the local authority: And they really, really don’t understand, because they haven’t done it, they don’t understand how highly vulnerable and sometimes volatile families can be made to feel welcome, can be made to feel they belong. We were in a meeting about just reorganising the building six

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months ago and the people from a social care background came in to say, for instance they’d put security on the doors and they’ve said, they’d talk about clients. And I said, Children’s Centres don’t have clients. It’s just the terminology, everybody has that built-​in sense that you’re going to be doing something to somebody. Therefore the material and emotional geographies of entering a building, and under what terms and terminologies, point to the importance of the links or transitions between the home space and a space of public service provision. Within this there were questions of power, and the nature and rationalities of care, as well as of time: Because lots of these families need more than a six week, they need the building up of relationships, they need to build up their confidence … And that’s not the same as you going up to some stranger in some remote hub who’s offering variably skilled, some of them highly skilled and some not skilled at all. It makes us very angry so … [laughs]. It is interesting at the end of this quote that the professional spoke about being ‘very angry’ but then laughed: while I expected that interviews with service users might be highly emotional, I was surprised by the emotional intensity of interviews with professionals like this one too. I read this laughter as indicative of being overwhelmed by her feelings, and indeed I remember this professional apologising to me for feeling so emotional about the situation. Overall, I detected a sense of existential crisis surrounding professional identities and practices within Children’s Centre services, whereby the values of care that had been at the centre of their work had been thrown into question. The following quote, from the manager of a Children’s Centre that had undergone

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radical cuts, shows how questions about who deserves ‘care’ and welfare services had been sharply reframed within austerity politics, leading to a wider sense of a questioning of her values: I do understand that you know, there’s cuts to services for older people. I keep thinking of an older person waiting at home for someone to come and look after them, you know they need feeding, they need washing, they need someone to visit them. I suppose compared to that, what we are doing here is a luxury. You know, what is a luxury? What is human life? This quote highlights the ways in which the funding crisis in adult social care has been played off against funding for services such as Children’s Centres within local and national debates about austerity. It is interesting that direct care in the home is considered a priority, while collective care and support within a Children’s Centre becomes a luxury. However, to return to the quotes from service users in the earlier part of this chapter, those direct forms of care in the home might become manageable and sustainable through support in a collective space such as a Children’s Centre. As already intimated, the ethics (and practices) of care surrounding children’s services were very much in flux in the local authority areas. ‘Care’ and ‘needs’ were becoming a matter of individualised families, or more specifically a matter of individual children within families. An interview with a senior local authority official, who had been partly responsible for the closure of Children’s Centres, spoke about the priorities of the ‘new service’ very much in terms of individual problem solving. A driver behind this problem solving was to reduce the demand for ‘statutory services’, that is, social work interventions potentially involving legal ‘care’ proceedings to remove children from families. While on one level this official may have been driven by what we would recognise as an ethic of ‘care’ for the

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children and families she spoke about, what emerged from the way she spoke about the families was a desire to reduce costs and pressure on services. As the headteacher above identified, this is partly about language and terminology: a particular professional discourse is evident in how the local authority official discusses the service: So these staff are working in the communities, trying to identify needs, trying to put as much resource around as they can. If however, they identify that the child is at a stage where actually they require a more targeted service, but it’s not at the threshold for children’s social care, what they can do is they can make a referral to the non-​stat part if you like of the Family Solutions. The person from there can join the team around the family and then will work with that multi-​professional group. They can do home visiting, they can do the lead professional role. This official mentioned maternal mental health which, as my own research has shown, was clearly an issue that Children’s Centres had tackled. However, she phrased this issue, and the reasons for tackling it, in a very different way: And then we’re also doing a big piece of work around perinatal mental health as well because that’s a big issue in terms of attachment. What we find is in terms of kids requiring that statutory service, a lot of issues go back to poor attachment at a … at a young age. The ‘problem’ of maternal mental health thus becomes a problem for children’s attachment which might result in costly services later on. Again, it would be unfair to single out this particular official for not ‘caring’. Rather the approaches she explained exemplify quite long-​standing debates within children’s services and social work in particular about care, needs and the ethics and

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values of practice (Featherstone et al 2018). However, as austerity cuts bear down, the more instrumental and economically oriented approaches espoused here become more prominent in navigating the links between care at home within families and the welfare state. Conclusions As noted at the outset, researching services that are undergoing austerity closures and cuts has a paradox at the centre of it: at the point of closure, the values and importance of these services come into sharp relief, often in emotionally heightened ways (Robinson and Sheldon 2018). Capturing these values, and also the modes of their expression as service users and wider communities fight cuts, can feel redundant at times as closures continue. In the case of Sure Start Children’s Centres, recent research by the Sutton Trust (Smith et al 2018) suggests that centres throughout England are currently falling off a ‘cliff-​edge’ as more and more authorities consider drastic service reductions. My sense, and indeed this was made somewhat explicit within council meetings in one of the local authorities, was that, as councils became aware of some authorities managing to push through closures, this emboldened them. There are legal and statutory obligations around Children’s Centre services, but these are somewhat vague, and councils going for the closure of all existing centres could provide precedents for the interpretation of such obligations in new ways. So where does this leave questions of care and the home space, and of the range of ways in which the welfare state might be involved in such terrain? A  dominant aspect of political discourses under austerity, including those concerned with care, is a narrowing of what is considered possible and sayable within a broader discursive construction of the ‘current climate’ (see Horton 2016). The earlier quote from the Children’s Centre manager, about thinking of the older person at home

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waiting for care, exemplifies a discursive context in which it has become impossible to imagine the provision of sufficient public services for both elder care at home and Children’s Centres beyond the home space. As such, paying attention to the views and perspectives of those protesting closure can help us think beyond these discursive confines. While particular campaigns against closures may be lost, they may nonetheless make visible a set of new possibilities around home space, care and the welfare state that point to different futures.

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SIX Conclusion: opening up the politics of the home Eleanor Jupp, Sophie Bowlby, Jane Franklin and Sarah Marie Hall

Seeing and sensing the politics of the home This final chapter draws together some of the conceptual, methodological and normative threads from preceding chapters to point towards ways to reimagine home and care within research and also in wider politics. A  key concern across all chapters has been around public and private spheres, and by extension questions of visibility and invisibility. How do questions of the politics of care and home come to be both ‘sensed’ and ‘seen’, at a range of personal and political levels? When and how do certain conditions become a matter of ‘public’ concern? As discussed at the opening, this links to questions of what gets identified and named as a ‘crisis’. As a recent and related example from the field of housing shows, crises may be variably visible and invisible. The idea that there is currently a ‘housing crisis’ within the UK is not controversial (Edwards 2016), and the phrase is routinely used in news and policy reports. The causes of this crisis, clearly geographically and socially very uneven, include the loss of

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social housing via various mechanisms and the role of globalised finance capital in house purchase contributing to an ever increasing gap between income and house prices (Watt and Minton 2016; Hodkinson 2018). Yet, for a national crisis, it remains largely invisible to many people, literally behind ‘closed doors’, neither seen nor felt by sections of the population who have access to secure housing and the means to continue to access it. However, on 14 June 2017, the fact that there was a crisis in housing in the UK became dramatically and horrifically apparent. A fire swept through a 24-​storey block of social housing, Grenfell Tower in west London, killing 72 residents and destroying the homes of many more. The block had been recently refurbished, and it became apparent that this largely cosmetic refurbishment had been completed without due regard for the safety of residents, and indeed concerns had been pointedly ignored. The tragedy shone a light on the costs of the fragmentation of housing provision and services mentioned above. While the local authority seemed initially indifferent to the fate of residents, and indeed completely out of touch with the sectors of the population affected (MacLeod 2018), community and media pressures have since combined to force both local and national government to provide assistance to families who lost their homes as well as suffering deeply traumatic experiences. The question of finding new long-​term permanent homes for those families remains a topic of discussion and national concern, but, despite this spotlight, at the time of writing, over a year after the fire, only around half the families affected had moved into permanent new homes. Clearly the Grenfell fire was a uniquely traumatic event which will change the lives of those who survived in the tower and those living nearby forever. Yet the housing crisis involves more everyday forms of trauma (Pain 2014) –​displacement, lack of support, evictions, lack of permanent accommodation –​these are the ‘everyday crises’ experienced by many families, especially in London. The difficulties and delays in rehousing the Grenfell

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families point to the many more families in London who are also awaiting a permanent home. The notion of ‘crisis’ therefore also implies a certain kind of temporality, an intensification of conditions that may then move towards some kind of resolution, perhaps involving aspects of ‘resilience’ (Gill and Orgad 2018) in the face of crises (Walby 2015; Hall and Ince 2017). Yet, as should be clear from the preceding chapters, crises around home and care involve a range of temporalities that are not normally short-​ lived. Particular moments, such as the closure of a Children’s Centre, the need to provide care for elderly relatives or the need to move house at short notice, may be experienced as intense and traumatic. However, the ongoing and repetitive dynamics of home, care and gender that underline them may be diffuse and incoherent, the stuff of everyday life, involving experiences that may be cyclical and sustained, and impact on a sense of the future as well as of the present (see Chapter Four). Dealing with such problems over time is wearing (Wilkinson and Ortega-​Alcázar 2018), exhausting the body (Hitchen 2016). As already noted, this can make such crises hard to connect to issues of power, politics, the economy and policy. Indeed, while it is possible to argue that media and digital culture have in some ways broken down barriers between private and public lives, bringing some aspects of women’s experiences of home and care into ‘public’ view (Wilson and Yochim 2017), these ‘intimate public spheres’, as Berlant (2008) argues, may actually militate against political and critical insights and change. Everyday representations of home, care and personal lives, for example within forms of social media such as Instagram and Facebook, may ultimately function to reprivatise these issues within practices of consumption and individual identity work (Gambles 2010). Drawing on feminist approaches and theories, this book has therefore sought to provide new conceptual, empirical and

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methodological resources to see and feel the politics of the home. In Chapter Two, Franklin uses a form of ‘feminist genealogy’ (Rose 2017) to show how policy discourses around social care encapsulate a certain view of the home, and therefore of caring labour, in slippery and diffuse ways. This goes beyond a critical deconstruction of policy language to a more far-​reaching way of exploring underlying patterns and norms of meaning that circulate behind terms like the ‘untapped potential’ of care at home. While these changes in language may be subtle, such phrases signal a shift of responsibilities for care from the welfare state to individuals, families and communities that may be experienced in dramatic ways within everyday lives. This is because, as other chapters show, resources for care at home are very unevenly distributed, and generally depend on the material, practical and emotional labour of women. Chapter Three provides a framework for showing how such inequalities are a question not only of aspects such as gender, ethnicity and poverty but also of the home space itself. Bowlby offers a new framework for illuminating how housing, both as material form and as a site of lived experience, frames radical inequalities in relation to care. Such inequalities include housing as economic asset, as providing certain material affordances and as emplaced within wider landscapes and networks of care. All this shows how housing provision should be evaluated much more explicitly in relation to care: definitions of ‘suitable housing’ in policy have very material effects on the choices available to families and individuals (Lund 2017). Bowlby’s framework shows how poor, insecure or ‘unsuitable’ housing has huge implications for the provision of care in society. Chapter Four also explores, this time in relation to research practice and methodologies, how issues of care and personal life may be shaped by political and economic factors, focusing squarely on austerity and associated financial insecurity and hardship. Hall introduces a methodological tool which can illuminate –​for both her and her research participants –​the

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interweaving of issues of home and care with the economic and political dimensions of austerity. Like the layers of acetate that she uses to generate data, her methods show how we can see and sense embodied, intimate experiences of home and family through a range of lenses that can enable new insights and analysis. This process may be difficult and perhaps emotionally painful in itself for research participants. Indeed, in Chapter Five it is a moment of overt crisis, the closure of local Sure Start Children’s Centres, that illuminates and makes visible the value of the centres for users, and the nature of the support and care they provide to mothers and young children. Chiming with insights from Chapter Three, the mothers’ accounts show how effective care at home depends on wider spaces and networks of care. Their experiences also show that the involvement of local government in providing and resourcing such networks and spaces is crucial. The centres are revealed to have been spaces of negotiation between professionals and citizens, as well as among different groups within communities. This was in the face of proposals to seek greater involvement of communities and volunteers in the provision of family support, using the kind of problematic ‘untapped potential’ referred to in Chapter Two. Matters of welfare, politics and citizenship Drawing on this last point, overall the book makes an argument for the ongoing importance of the welfare state in matters of care, housing and everyday lives. This is not to idealise a ‘golden age’ of welfare, which depended historically on a patriarchal vision of home and family, and more recently on an uneasy settlement between work within and beyond the home for women (Fraser 2016). Indeed the boundaries between the policy and politics of the welfare state and personal lives and homes have never been straightforward (Fink 2004). It remains the case that the kind of relational support valued by, for example, the

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Children’s Centre users in Chapter Five has never been fully valued within policy (Rustin 2013). In the first instance, the book makes a clear argument about the damaging effects of cuts to welfare services and benefits, in the name of both austerity and a broader neoliberal project. The chapters together also make a case for the need to comprehend issues such as housing, care, work and health, conventionally understood as involving different services and forms of knowledge, as all tied up and interrelated within everyday lives. This is not a technical-​managerial call for the ‘joining up’ of policy areas (Clark 2002), but rather an attempt to understand that the ‘holding’ or ‘enabling’ environment (Honig 2017) that the welfare state may promise comes from interactions between forms of support or services outside the home. For example, lack of access to secure housing has clear implications for care, health, education and more. As services and provision are experienced as increasingly absent, the remaining spaces where families continue to encounter the state, such as schools (Ryan, 2015), may feel under increasing pressure to manage other aspects of crisis and vulnerability. Yet, for many families that may perhaps not be at a point of overt crisis yet, such losses of wider support will be experienced rather as a turning inwards, a fragmentation away from collective spaces and resources, to spaces of the home and family. What then, of collective political change? While the private home space and the spheres of public politics may feel far apart, preceding chapters have also hinted at the possibility for political agency and citizenship to emerge from the home space. Both Chapters Four and Five consider how personal stories may be mobilised to affect political change. Such insights challenge a dichotomy between citizenship and the home space, a point also suggested in Chapter Two. Franklin draws on feminist scholars such as Kimberly Maslin who argues that the invisibility of women at home is particularly problematic: ‘since it is the activity of being seen and heard by others that validates one’s

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existence, this interaction serves as a tether of sorts between the individual and the world’ (Maslin 2013: 597). Maslin recognises that the competing claims that confront women between work and home, economic independence and family responsibility, may become a series of impossible choices: Women must renounce either social equality or economic independence; they must accept either enslavement in their own home or the dissolution of their families; women must either be constrained by biologically grounded tasks or renounce reproduction and family life; women must proclaim motherhood the most satisfying experience of a lifetime despite chronic sleep deprivation and the prevalence of depression. This denial of lived experience is often accompanied by an escape into the private realm. Though the private realm and the activities that take place there (thinking) are important preconditions for a public presentation, there is a profound danger in occupying either the private or the public realm exclusively. (Maslin 2013: 597) More optimistically, further developing this theme of the home and political engagement and participation, Andrea Thuma argues, that the home provides the “ground” which attaches the individual to the world around her, offers her space for action, and thereby enables her to intervene in it (Thuma 2011). Kristin Jacobson also argues that, rather than politics and the home being separate, experiences of home are the grounding for public-​ness and the precondition of citizenship ( Jacobson 2010: 245). Indeed she asserts that human beings can become citizens or public beings only in a shared space, ‘by emerging from our familiar personal territories’ ( Jacobson 2010:  219). We can learn, through experiences that arise only ‘through our way of being-​at-​home-​in-​the-​world’ (  Jacobson 2010:  221), to become attuned to ‘passive elements of our experience …

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that slip into the background to become the stability on which we depend without the need to pay heed to it’ ( Jacobson 2009: 371). It is these passive elements, which are crucial for care and citizenship, that are disregarded and relied on in policies designed to harness the economic value of intimate work. Yet we can only truly be political, have political agency, recognise each other as political subjects and act in the public sphere when we have the existential grounding that home might provide. All this then suggests that home is political not only in relation to the politics of care and household work, but also for its political effect in creating the conditions for politics. What would a new active citizenship emerging from the home space look like? For Ruth Lister, women’s citizenship cannot be achieved within the rigid hierarchy of public/​private, but requires the recognition of women’s lives at home and at work, bringing factors of economic autonomy and the sexual division of labour into play (2003a: 10). She suggests that women’s involvement in formal and informal politics, across and between public and private spaces, calls for ‘a more permeable model of formal politics, more open both to individual women and to the influence of informal kinds of politics in which many women will probably still prefer to participate’ (Lister 2003a:  10; Jupp 2017). Home spaces are spheres of what Franklin (Chapter Two) calls ‘immanence’, shifting and imperfect, reflecting the messiness of real lives and shaped by different rhythms and responsibilities. Homes, as sites of care, are also spheres of interdependency, relationality and creativity, as previous chapters have shown. We suggest that by paying attention to interdependency, relationality and creativity, new forms of ethics and politics may emerge. However, in order for such resources and values within homes to be brought to the fore, there needs to be a more just distribution of work, care, income and time across households.

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Notes Two: Home economics: home and care in neoliberal policy 1

2

Centre for Social Justice, ‘Social breakdown and poverty’, http://​www. centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/​ a bout-​ u s/​ s ocial-​ b reakdown- ​ a nd- ​ p overty (accessed 12 May 2014). The Labour Party, ‘Labour Party Manifesto:  Health Care for All’, 2017, https://​labour.org.uk/​manifesto (accessed 16 May 2018).

Three: Caring in domestic spaces: inequalities and housing 1

2

The political difficulties of such attempts were illustrated by the hostility aroused by the Conservative Party’s manifesto plan in the 2017 general election to make individuals use their housing wealth to pay for long-​term care in their homes in later life. It was dubbed a ‘dementia tax’ by some in the media. An ‘ontologically secure person has a stable and unquestioned sense of self and of his or her place in the world in relation to other people and objects’ (Jackson and Hogg 2010).

Five: Spaces of care beyond the home: austerity and children’s services 1

This animation is currently available to view at the University of Kent’s YouTube channel, https://​ w ww.youtube.com/​ w atch?v=tKb1NWVNFIw (accessed 13 March 2019).

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140

Index

Note: Page numbers in italics refer to figures.

case studies 72–​85 bodily impairments 51–​2 Boterman, W. R. 57 Bowlby, S. 4, 9, 10–​11, 42, 43, 55, 56, 110

A active citizens 27–​8, 29–​31 active citizenship 114 Adkins, L. 23 Alber, E. 66 Angus, J. 55, 56 Anthias, F. 44 anticipatory anxieties 3 asset-​based welfare  46 austerity 63 and care 90–​1, 105–​6 and feminism 5–​6 and neoliberalism 2–​4 relational biographies 11, 64 research findings 72–​83 research methodology 70–​2 relationality 69–​70 Sure Start Children’s Centres 88, 91–​2, 93–​4, 103–​6 Aylesbury Estate, London 58–​9

C Cameron, D. 20 capitalism 88–​9 care 6–​7 active citizens 29–​30 and austerity 90–​1, 105–​6 and capitalism 88–​9 Conservative government 22–​3 dependencies 66–​7 existential crisis of 100–​5 at home 8–​10, 30–​1 disadvantages 95–​6, 97, 98 and housing quality 50–​4, 60 inequalities 40–​5 relevant factors and interactions 41 and neoliberalism 3–​4 as resistance 90 support networks 56 and the welfare state 88–​90, 111–​12

B bedroom tax 53–​4 benefit cap 58 Bennett, F. 21 big society 20–​2 biographical mapping 70–​2

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care crisis 109 care employment 9 caringscape 66 Centre for Social Justice 21 Child Poverty Action Group 58 childcare 76 see also Sure Start Children’s Centres choice 21 citizenship 29–​30, 36–​7, 112–​14 Clarke, J. 29 Coalition government 29, 58 communitarianism 17, 19, 20 community 17, 58 mixed communities 58–​9 community politics 17–​18 feminist critique 18–​20 Conservative governments 20–​3 crisis 1–​2 care 109 housing 107–​9

critique of neoliberalism 18–​20, 33–​6 and neoliberalism 16, 89–​90 feminist genealogy 14–​15, 110 Fitzpatrick, S. 55 fixed term tenancies (FTTs) 55 formal care 9, 55–​6 see also paid-​for care; volunteer care Franklin, J. 3–​4, 10, 18, 24, 35, 110, 112, 114 Fraser, N. care and neoliberalism 3, 23 dependency 7, 26 feminism and neoliberalism 19 feminist genealogy 14, 15 neoliberal binaries 35 welfare state 88–​9, 111 Frazer, E. 18, 19, 20, 21, 35 friendships 97–​100

G

D

gender 3 see also women gender inequality 26–​7 gender relations 23–​5 genealogy 14–​15, 110 ‘genealogy of dependency, a’ (Fraser and Gordon) 14 Gillis, J. R. 67, 81 Glucksmann, M. 9 Gordon, L. 7, 14, 15, 26, 35 Greater Manchester 64 Grenfell Tower 108–​9 Guardian, The 53

Davies, A. 58 Dean, H. 31, 32 Department for Work and Pensions 53 dependency 7, 14–​15, 25–​6, 27 see also interdependency digital culture 109 disability scholars/​activists  6 disabled people 51–​2, 53 domestic care see care: at home Dyck, I. 55

E

H

enabling environments 99, 112 entwined becomings 50 ethics of care 6, 103–​4 ethnography 70

Hall, S. M. 3, 11, 15, 63, 69, 114 Heaphy, B. 11, 67, 68, 79 Hochstenbach, C. 57 holding environments 99, 112 home 4–​6, 13–​14 care at 8–​10, 30–​1 disadvantages 95–​6, 97, 98 and housing quality 50–​4, 60 inequalities 40–​5

F failed care 91 feminism 15 and austerity 5–​6 and care 6 142

Index

relevant factors and interactions 41 feminist genealogy 14–​15 and identity 54–​6, 60 in neoliberal discourse 3–​4, 15–​16, 24–​33, 36–​7 active citizens 27–​8, 29–​31 untapped potential 31–​3 and political engagement 112–​14 home dialysis 52 home visiting 98 Honig, B. 99, 100, 112 housing 56, 82, 110 as an asset 45–​50, 60 impact of h. quality on domestic care 50–​4, 60 housing careers/​pathways 48–​50, 57–​9, 60 housing crisis 107–​9

language 10, 15–​16, 25–​8, 110 active citizens 27–​8, 29–​31 neoliberal binaries 34–​5 untapped potential 31–​3 lay normativities 7 Lees, L. 58–​9 lifecourse 42, 47, 48, 64–​6 relational biographies 67–​8 Kerry 72–​7 Selma 81–​3 Zoe 77–​81 relationality 66–​7 linked lives 67 Lister, R. 21, 26, 27, 29, 92, 114 Littler, J. 19, 23 Luxton, M. 33 Lyon, D. 9

M Mackie, P. K. 57 Maslin, K. 112–​13 media 109 mental health 104 mixed communities 58–​9 Moffatt, S. 58

I identity 54–​6, 60 inclusion 99–​100 inequalities of care 40–​5 inequality 26–​7, 67, 69 informal care 8, 9–​10 interdependency 7, 66–​7, 68 intersectionality 43–​5 interventions 91, 100

N National Care Service 22 need 32, 93–​4 neighbourhood factors relevant to care in 41 see also mixed communities neoliberal binaries 34–​5 neoliberalism austerity and 2–​4 Conservative governments 20–​2 discourse of home 3–​4, 15–​16, 24–​33, 36–​7 active citizens 27–​8, 29–​31 untapped potential 31–​3 and feminism 16, 89–​90 feminist critique 18–​20, 33–​6 gender relations 23–​5 language 15–​16 New Labour 17–​18 New Labour 16, 17–​18, 29 feminist critique 18–​20

J Jacobson, K. 29–​30, 37, 113–​14 Jarrett, T. 22–​3 Johnson-​Hanks, J. 65, 66, 74 Jupp, E. 11, 89, 92, 94, 97, 100, 114

K Kerry (case study) 72–​7

L Labour Party 22, 23 see also New Labour Lacey, N. 18, 19, 20, 21, 35

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social housing 48, 51, 82 bedroom tax 53–​4 fixed term tenancies (FTTs) 55 social investment state 17–​18, 92–​3 social media 109 space 42–​3, 44–​5, 65–​6 spare room subsidy 53–​4 spending cuts see austerity support networks 56–​9, 60 Sure Start Children’s Centres 11, 90, 92, 111 austerity 88, 91–​2, 93–​4, 103–​6 benefits to users 95–​100 existential crisis of care 100–​5 research methodology 94–​5

O owner occupation 46–​7

P paid-​for care 8, 9, 55–​6 see also formal care Pain, R. 108 personalisation 20–​1, 31 Phillips, A. 15 place 43 policy language 15–​16, 25–​8, 110 active citizens 27–​8, 29–​31 neoliberal binaries 34–​5 untapped potential 31–​3 political participation 112–​14 poverty 21 power 7, 36, 40, 102 privatisation 32–​3 public things 99, 100

T targeted interventions 91, 100 Thuma, A. 113 time 42, 44–​5, 65–​6, 68, 79 Tronto, J. 30

R relational biographies 11, 67–​8 Kerry 72–​7 Selma 81–​3 Zoe 77–​81 relationality 66–​7, 69–​70 rental sector 48, 51 Rose, N. 14, 17, 110

U untapped potential 31–​3 urban redevelopment 58–​9

V Vision for Adult Social Care, A (DH 2010) 15–​16, 25–​6, 27, 28, 31 volunteer care 8, 9 see also formal care

S Schwanen, T. 50 self-​care  8, 52 Selma (case study) 81–​3 Slay, J. 21 Smith, G. 93, 105 social arenas 44 Social Care Green Paper 22–​3 social care policy 15–​16 language 15–​16, 25–​8, 110 active citizens 27–​8, 29–​31 neoliberal binaries 34–​5 untapped potential 31–​3 see also Vision for Adult Social Care, A (DH 2010)

W Watts, B. 55 welfare 26 asset-​based  46 welfare dependency 14–​15, 25–​6, 27 welfare state 88–​90, 111–​12 Wellman, B. 56 women austerity 3, 63 as carers 9

144

Index

citizenship 112–​14 labour 67 neoliberal binaries 36 neoliberalism 23–​5, 37 Women’s Budget Group 3, 20

Y young people 57

Z Zoe (case study) 77–​81

145

Eleanor Jupp is Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at the University of Kent. Sophie Bowlby is Visiting Fellow at Reading University and Visiting Professor at Loughborough University. Jane Franklin is a political sociologist with an interest in feminism, social theory and politics. Sarah Marie Hall is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Manchester.

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ELEANOR JUPP, SOPHIE BOWLBY, JANE FRANKLIN AND SARAH MARIE HALL

THE NEW POLITICS OF HOME Housing, gender and care in times of crisis

ISBN 978-1-4473-5184-9

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9 781447 351849

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P O L IRCEYS EPARRECSHS ELEANOR JUPP, SOPHIE BOWLBY, JANE FRANKLIN AND SARAH MARIE HALL

“Raising the political agenda, these multidisciplinary authors come together to give a timely reminder of home as a place of care that is situated, intergenerational and essentially both private and public. An insightful book that needs to be read.” Sheila Peace, Professor of Social Gerontology, The Open University

Home and care are central aspects of everyday, personal lives, yet they are also shaped by political and economic change. Within a context of austerity, economic restructuring, worsening inequality and resource rationing, the policies and experiences around these key areas are shifting. Taking an interdisciplinary and feminist perspective, this book illustrates how economic and political changes affect everyday lives for many families and households in the UK. Setting out both new empirical material and new conceptual terrain, the authors draw on approaches from human geography, social policy, and feminist and political theory to explore issues of home and care in times of crisis.

THE NEW POLITICS OF HOME

“This groundbreaking volume examines ways in which a focus on home can illuminate austerity governance and its impact, shifts in the economies of care, and the spatial materialities of gendered lives.” Janet Newman, Emeritus Professor of Social Policy, The Open University

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