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In the continuing transfer of responsibility for social care from state institutions to communities and home spaces the economic value of home, women’s labour and personal resources, is anticipated and taken for granted. Working with feminist theory and policy analysis this chapter explores the complex ways that home is inscribed in policy language to make intimate and personal resources economically available for the informal delivery of social care. The author argues that home is a key mechanism for shaping a new economy of care in contemporary politics and policy making.
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.
This chapter sets the following chapters within an overall landscape of social policy, governance and economic changes. It will assess the current political and economic moment in terms of austerity and welfare reform and set out some of the conceptual and theoretical resources, around care, crisis, and the home, as they are drawn on in the rest of the book. It also introduces the rest of the chapters.
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. The chapter considers how to make the politics of the home more ‘visible’ when crises are often absorbed into everyday lives. Feminist analysis suggests the need to consider new forms of citizenship and political action which can link the home space to wider sites of politics.
