SDG 5 aims to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. Browse books and journal articles relating to this SDG below and find out more on the UN Sustainable Development Goals website.
This chapter demonstrates how ailment mobilises concrete, embodied and emotional responses in immediate social encounters and care work, along with discussing the gendered, racialised and classed divisions of care labour that extend to a global scale. The relatedness and variance inherent in ailment – and care as a key response to it – mean that there is a large degree of unpredictability in the chain reactions that ailment creates. Moreover, as responses to ailment may include neglect, violence and humiliation, a variety of ethical and political identities and structures can ensue. Societal structures and the organisation of care work specifically affect and ail those who have less power, influence and money: typically, working-class women, racialised minorities and international migrants. The varying responses to ailment in the world may be imagined as an emergent and constantly changing network of relatedness and affects that organise societies. Within these local and global networks, those caring for others are also affected by their care relationships and may suffer various kinds of distress, which are discussed in terms of caregiver ailment. Political and institutional actors who ignore the relationality of care and often disregard the needs of the caregiver play a major role in engendering and perpetuating caregiver ailment.
This chapter introduces the concept of ailment, which is about generalised care needs, including the need for self-care. Ailment does not indicate an immediate dependency on others. Rather, it is a human condition and force that mobilises emotions, actions and relations. Responses to ailment extend from concrete encounters between human beings in the immediate environment to political and institutional responses in societies across the world. The political relatedness that ailment enacts in the world and the different kinds of social orders that emerge through different personal and collective responses to the needs of ailing subjects are discussed.
Deficiencies in old age care are some of the most pressing human rights concerns in mature welfare states.
This book radically challenges the ethics of viewing care as a tradeable commodity and introduces a novel framework for understanding and analysing social care through the concept of ailment. Providing examples from the British and Finnish welfare states, it demonstrates how ailment shapes societies from the micro to the macro level. Addressing the marketisation and financialisation of care, the authors bring to light increasing inequalities in care.
This book argues that ailment is part of human life and society, and therefore the politics of care should begin with a politics of ailment.
This chapter concludes the book by focusing on today’s circumstances, with ailing bodies having become sources of profit making and the ailments of their caregivers largely unacknowledged or misrecognised. It is time to change how humans are perceived. The notion of homo aegrotus – the ailing human – recognises ailment as a permanent and all-encompassing feature of societies. It generates a variety of responses and creates webs of connections between individuals, families, communities, regions and countries. When approaching the field of care with the concept of ailment, a new political regime becomes imaginable. The new political regime derives from ailment in its two senses: the existential state of human ailing, and the affective or responsive state of being bothered by it. The ailing earth is also implicated here, emphasising human interdependency with biodiversity and ecosystems and thus opening possibilities for research into and the development of sustainable, caring policies. From this perspective, large portions of modern societies appear to be built around ailment.
This chapter examines how the marketisation and financialisation of care are transforming and challenging the social and care policies developed during the heyday of the welfare state. Marketisation and financialisation significantly affect these politics of ailment by introducing the mechanisms of profit making, competition and choice as solutions to human ailment and by replacing the ailing subject with a market actor as the target of social policies. Nevertheless, ailment continues to be a mobilising force that simultaneously generates both social and care relations and market and financial activities. The problem with these trends and the neoliberal vision on which they rely is that the logic of the market is different from – and largely incompatible with – responses to ailment that are based on a logic of care. While businesses perceive ailment as producing unlimited market opportunities, they fail as to the more profound recognition of ailment as an existential human condition warranting ethically sound responses such as affordable care.
This chapter’s sections – ‘Sanctioning the ailing’, ‘Protecting the ailing workforce’, ‘Acknowledging ailment’ and ‘Failing the ailing’ – trace how ailment as a social force has historically manifested itself in social and care policies in western societies. In pre-modern Europe, workhouses and other disciplinary institutions were used to control and sanction ailing individuals. Later, social policies began to recognise the need to protect the ailing workforce to secure the demands of an industrialising world. After the Second World War, social and care policies began addressing ailment throughout the life course, and collective and public responses to the needs of ailing individuals expanded to several areas of life as part of the modern welfare state. The transformation of the welfare state and the austerity politics of recent decades have undermined the acknowledgement of ailment in social and care policies. Through this exploration, it is demonstrated how ailment creates various relations and responses and how these responses combine elements of care, control and profit making to different degrees, depending on the historical, political and social context.
Everything in life is inextricably interconnected. Yet, there is global dominance of neoliberalism, an ideology that is fundamentally based on disconnection. We are living a contradiction, treading a tightrope between cooperation and competition, trying to reform a worldview that is fundamentally at variance with the wellbeing of humanity and the planet. This is a remarkable moment in history: never before has a political system been this successfully destructive; but never before have the ideas, knowledge and skills to build a world of sustainability, peace and justice been at our fingertips.
Crisis is a chance for change
The choices we have made have consequences that have taken life on Earth into a multiplicity of crises, shunting humanity and the natural world of which it is part to the brink of extinction. Climate change, a coronavirus pandemic, species extinction, rising sea levels, environmental degradation … are not limited by national boundaries, but reminders of our planetary interdependence, our responsibility for the health of each other and the planet. At the same time, White supremacy is expressing itself in a resurgence of a Far-Right politics of disconnection, of individualism, greed, Brexit, the nationalistic building of walls, targeting all those other than the privileged. This intersectional, neoliberal project interweaves in a tapestry of structural discrimination its threads of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, disablism … and a strange hatred of our next generation, the hope for humanity’s future! We have, quite literally, been stitched up!
The Map is not the Territory. (Bateson, 1972)
We see the world, not as it is but as we are – or as we are conditioned to see it. (Covey, 2004)
We have explored so far two elements of participatory practice that are key to transformative change and, in doing so, we have indicated that neither can achieve that potential without the third element: critical reflection. While we can start to open up the spaces for engagement with story and dialogue, to sow the seeds of individual and collective learning for change, reflection and reflexivity need to be interwoven into those elements to create the fabric of critical knowledge and thoughtful action. This cannot be an added extra but has to be integral to all we do. We can encourage people to tell their stories of lived experience and we can enter into dialogue together about what we hear, but this will remain a surface activity unless we add critical reflection for learning to happen. So, this chapter will explore what we mean by critical reflection and offer some conceptual ideas taken from critical and other theorists to help in the facilitation of critical reflection, particularly concerning power, both for ourselves and others.
At the core is the art of questioning the taken-for-granteds of everyday life and going ever deeper in that exploration through the continual cycling of reflection and action that underpins praxis and is the basis of transformation, encouraging us all to look below the surface and nurture the development of a sense of curiosity about why things are as they are.
This second edition of our book was written slightly differently from the first. Both are the product of a shared journey, influenced by the experiences of two very different lives. In this, as in the first, edition we have approached the task in the spirit of the book itself, founding our approach on dialogue, on mutuality and respect for each other’s ideas, and on an openness to a dialectical challenge, locating dissent as central to knowledge creation within a frame of ‘connected knowing’ (Belenky et al, 1997). The original book was the product of an organic, transformative process for us, a process that continued afterwards. When we were approached by Policy Press to produce a second edition we were both in very different places, geographically and temporally. This, together with the pandemic during which we were writing, posed a challenge to our previous way of working. The result is a book that reflects our two voices and our experiences since the first edition.
In the book itself, we emphasise the use of story as a way of anchoring the process of change in lived experience. True to this approach, we share aspects of our own stories with you here. A participatory approach calls for us to acknowledge the ways in which our own life experiences have shaped the ideas that we share with you, and these vignettes give you insight into critical moments that have influenced our theory and practice over the years. We met in 1992 and became firm friends, who recognised our shared values long before we recognised shared academic interests.
