Care: challenges and solutions for a sustainable future
Around the world, arrangements for the care of people who need help to manage daily life are evolving. Care is needed ‘at home’ and ‘across continents’; it must meet the needs of individuals and of families and communities; it must be possible alongside paid work and connect with health services. It can occur at any life stage, is of incalculable value, yet comes at no small cost; its consequences for families and social relations truly matter.
Changing families, longer lives and shifting economic and policy contexts lie behind this evolution. Yet today, care arrangements are not sustainable; too often they fail to deliver wellbeing. Forms of care work are diversifying, yet care remains low status work. Users offered ‘choice’ face rationed services. Public systems are under strain, market actors struggle and the role of technologies remains unclear.
Organised by the Sustainable Care: connecting people and systems team based in the UK, this conference offers a space for critical analysis, constructive debate and forward thinking. It will provide ‘food for thought’ and a guide to action for researchers, practitioners, policy-makers and all who consider decent care a vital issue of our time.
We invite submissions to one of six conference themes, or ‘other’ if your paper doesn’t fit into any of the above other themes. The themes are:
- Inequalities in care: global, local and transnational dynamics in an age of migration
- Work, care and wellbeing: new solutions, ongoing challenges
- Technology in care: opportunities and obstacles in place-based care contexts
- Care markets: how and for whom do they work?
- Sustainable care at home: understanding the ‘care mix’
- Caring relations: toward sustainable arrangements with wellbeing outcomes
- Other [if your paper doesn’t fit into any of the above categories]
