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This chapter discusses the methodology used to research the informal social interactions that create and constitute the personal communities of women in their fifties in the context of their previous lifecourse experiences. The research prioritised the collection of data on how these women ‘kept in touch’ with the members of their personal communities over time and space, including the use of different forms of ICT, face-to-face meeting and activities in ‘real’ spaces. The chapter examines: problems of recruitment; the effect of asking people to list their lifecourse experiences in a Table; the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis and the analytical and ethical difficulties involved in research which asks people to give accounts of emotionally significant relationships.
This chapter examines how attention to issues of care could alter approaches to housing policy. It focuses on the interplay between housing and social inequalities. It contributes to intersectional analyses of care practices by combining analysis of the material, symbolic and economic aspects of housing’s intersections with caring relationships within the home. It discusses the role of housing in care as: an asset to finance care; as a built form; as a source of identity and ontological security; and as a base for fostering networks of support. It shows that that these wider implications of viewing dwellings as sites of care are significant for housing and wider social policy.
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 explores the school–work transitions of young men and women from different ethnic and class backgrounds in the two prosperous towns of Reading and Slough in England at the end of the 1990s. It examines how young people’s ideas of their own racialised and gendered identities affect their labour-market behaviour, and how racialised and gendered ideas held by employers about young people influence their employability. The chapter describes the interconnected phases in the transition from school to paid work that most young people pass through between sixteen and twenty-five years of age.
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.
