About Changing Places
Long-term care debates often assume that moving to residential care relieves residents and families from the intense care work that occurs in many households. Yet, the realities of unpaid care work in residential homes are poorly understood, prompting the need for further investigation of this critical policy area.
Our team’s current research suggests that changing conditions in residential care may prevent residents from doing self-care, while pressuring families to do more care work than they are prepared for. Changing Places: Unpaid Work in Residential Places is a comparative analysis of changes and continuities in self-care and family care work with the move from home to residential care.
Neo-liberal developments in public policy, increasing privatization, and population aging call out for research on how unpaid labour in the private household extends into paid care work and public services. To further develop theories on the relationship between private/unpaid and public/paid care work in aging societies, we will expand on feminist perspectives and conduct rapid ethnographies in nine residential care facilities in Ontario, Sweden, and Norway
The Research Team
