In this Research Group, we focus on care transitions and on how borders affect experience of care. We use a life course approach to understand longstanding risks and ‘system shocks’, such as Covid-19 and Brexit, for people requiring, receiving and providing care.

Transitions, including Life-course transitions (in relationships, education, employment, family stage) and service transitions (such as from children’s to adults’ services) can be experienced as ‘shocks’.  These sometimes have negative and enduring consequences for wellbeing. We explore how  smoother transitions could be achieved in the context of system, policy and service changes , complex and dynamic lives, and challenges arising from external shocks.  

Work on transitions and care is addressing crucial questions: 

• Across the life course, how do biographical events and services trigger transitions in care?
• How do people experience those transitions, with what consequences for their wellbeing? 
• What factors – geographical, gender, ethnic, socio-economic – mediate, improve or exacerbate these changes? 
• During transitions, how do different features of the care system support or damage individual and/or familial wellbeing?

Borders and care:  The need for new understandings of the relationship between diversity and inequalities in care experiences, and the consequences for care when family networks are dispersed across international borders could not be more urgent. Against the backdrop of historical and contemporary patterns of international migration, the UK Government’s ‘hostile environment’ and ‘austerity’ policies, and wider (re)/bordering processes (including the Covid-19 pandemic and the UK’s exit from the EU) we focus on two main topics: 

We ask: 

• At different life-course stages and over time, what is the lived experience of care when care networks are dispersed across borders? 
• When care networks cross borders, what challenges for individual and familial wellbeing are produced in the care ecosystem and by migration, employment and other systems? 
• How is the care ecosystem responding to increasing numbers of people from Black and Minoritised Ethnic and Refugee groups in the population, with what consequences for in/equalities in the lived experience of care?

In this work we put lived experience centre stage to explore the relational, affective and temporal nature of care in different parts of the care ecosystem. We are committed to using our work to influence care policy and practice and support ‘recognition’ of care in people’s daily lives. Our research is co-produced with people who require, receive and provide care in participatory and, we hope, empowering ways.