Browsing by Subject "Care work"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4

Feminism, care work, and collectivity : the case of progressive self-care
(2021-07-30) Berumen, Gwendolyn Marie; Williams, Christine L., 1959-
This study is an investigation into the social nature of self-care. Using the specific case of a phenomenon that I refer to as “progressive self-care,” I study a collection of groups that come together in order to practice a form of self-care that attempts to remove itself from capitalist productivity and consumption practices. Using Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Theory and Paula England’s Care as a Public Good framework, I find that groups attempt to politicize the nature of their meetings and the discourses surrounding rest, identity, and care in order to differentiate their practices from mainstream practices. I also find that collectivity is central to progressive self-care because it is fundamentally a collective practice, not an individual one. Finally, I find that progressive self-care practitioners use selfcare practices and discourses to dissect meanings of care and care work. I finish this study by discussing the implications of this work for further sociological research
Making space for respite : care work in the immigrant rights movement on the U.S.-Mexico border
(2021-08-12) Márquez, Alejandro Márquez; Rudrappa, Sharmila, 1966-; Ward, Peter; Rodríguez, Néstor; Young, Michael; Das Gupta, Monisha
My research focuses on nonprofit organizations, part of a broad immigrant rights movement, working on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands to provide much-needed assistance to migrants and asylum seekers. These organizations manage physically and emotionally demanding tasks that highlight the practical implications of helping displaced people. In my dissertation I ask, why do frontline caregivers assisting migrants and asylum seekers on the border stay committed despite low or no pay? How do they manage organizational resource scarcities that increase individual workloads and result in burnout? I answer these questions by analyzing how staff and volunteers provide legal aid and hospitality services in two nonprofit organizations in El Paso, Texas. During 2017-2018, I conducted participant observation in a legal aid office and at a migrant shelter for a combined 13 months while also conducting 51 interviews with caregivers. This allowed me to investigate the relationship between the practical and emotional hardships within the social movement helping migrants and asylum seekers. I find that these resource-scarce organizations manage not just the physical conglomeration of migrants and asylum seekers, but also their collective suffering. Caregivers and their organizations become selective service providers, favoring migrant cases that are winnable in the case of the legal aid office, or families that are more self-sufficient and easier to manage in the case of the shelter. Individuals physically and emotionally distance themselves from caregiving while maintaining cognitive attachments to the work. Case selectivity and detached attachments, as I respectively term these coping strategies, are articulated in the everyday life of the movement. These practices also generate meanings and moralities that enable caregivers to care adequately for the migrants they can care for, and manage their own emotions when they cannot. Research on emotions and social movements mostly focuses on how highly emotional experiences make people join social movements. I look at how emotions are also an outcome of the practices taking place in social movements. I show that everyday caregiving practices in social movements shape, in this case sustain, commitment to social change.
Occupational health and well-being among paid care workers
(2021-08-05) Pivnick, Lilla Kármán; Crosnoe, Robert; Gordon, Rachel A.; Raley, Kelly; Goosby, Bridget; Umberson, Debra
Work is a meaning laden, but stressful social institution with complex and sometimes contradicting implications for wellbeing. Taking a biopsychosocial approach, this dissertation adapts models of work-related stress typically applied at the individual level to the occupational level and examines how occupational requirements may be appraised differently by workers with different ramifications for their self-reported and underlying wellbeing, even early in the career. Using the care workforce as a case study (e.g., nurses, teachers), it investigates associations between occupational requirements and indicators of early-career wellbeing for a growing, essential, and increasingly diverse segment of the workforce. The aims of this dissertation are to (1) highlight differences in wellbeing between care workers and non-care workers; (2) identify ways that occupational-level requirements shape wellbeing, and (3) show which members of the care workforce shoulder the burdens of this type of work, both prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Results have wide-ranging implications for not only scholars who study work but also for policy makers, care workers themselves, and care-receiving clients. Together, this dissertation helps build a more comprehensive understanding of how worker wellbeing is stratified by occupation in ways that contribute to inequalities in population health.
Reproducing the state : women community health volunteers in north India
(2021-08-12) Marwah, Vrinda; Rudrappa, Sharmila, 1966-; Auyero, Javier; Glass, Jennifer; Fridman, Daniel; Ali, Kamran Asdar; Cons, Jason
India’s community health worker program is the largest in the world. Its one-million strong, all-women workforce is a success story. Since their appointment in 2005, these women, called ASHAs (Accredited Social Health Activists), have spearheaded significant improvements in the country’s maternal and child health outcomes. However, ASHAs are an exceptionally precarious workforce. They are “paid volunteers”, who receive none of the benefits of staff, and get per-case “incentives” instead of salaries. These poor and mostly lower caste women work round-the-clock in an under-resourced and over-burdened health system, for an itinerant pay that is a fraction of minimum wage. Given these conditions, I ask, how do ASHAs succeed in delivering health services? And what does their success tell us about state power? I conducted 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in North India, mostly in Punjab, including 80 interviews with ASHAs and ASHA program experts. I find that ASHAs reveal the productive power of an under-studied and gendered role in the state, that of a frontline bureaucrat. Frontline bureaucrats expand the reach of the state into communities. Although the gender, caste, and class marginality of ASHAs subsidizes the Indian state’s health system, ASHAs craft themselves into highly sought-after actors in service delivery. They do so by cultivating deeply intimate knowledge of women clients and their families, and by building networks among both public and private health care providers. In this way, they get not just intrinsic rewards—like skills, emotional fulfilment etc. usually associated with care work—but also extrinsic rewards, like commissions earned by referring patients to private clinics. I also find the care work of ASHAs comprises political socialization, that is, ASHAs educate their communities about the workings of the state, particularly welfare schemes, thus maintaining state legitimacy from below. In effect then, the very marginality that traps ASHAs into care work also unexpectedly allows them to maneuver into a social location of relative power within their communities.