Care Trajectories and Constraints
We explore experiences of care at different life stages, when families are geographically dispersed and as people experience different parts of the care system.
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.
Commentary on Care Trajectories and Constraints
Commentary pieces relating to Care Trajectories and Constraints
We virtually welcomed Dr Siobhan O’Dwyer from the University of Birmingham, to present Understanding suicide and homicide risk in unpaid carers. A recording of the presentation is now available to watch.
Read More about Seminar: Understanding suicide and homicide risk in unpaid carers, Dr Siobhan O’DwyerWe are pleased to virtually welcome Dr Sophie Rutter from the Information School, University of Sheffield, to present Community care workers’ access to hygiene facilities: the right to working conditions which “respect health, safety and dignity”
Read More about Seminar: Community care workers’ access to hygiene facilities: the right to working conditions which “respect health, safety and dignity”We welcomed Dr Yanan Zhang to present ‘Health inequalities across older adults cared for by daughters and sons in modernising China’ on 28th May 2024. A recording of the presentation is now available to watch.
Read More about Seminar: Health inequalities across older adults cared for by daughters and sons in modernising ChinaYingzi Shen writes about the multi-generational effects that rural-to-urban migration in China is having on familial care.
Read More about The glory and stress of Chinese rural migrant grandparents
Recent Publications
A selection of recent publications from the Care Trajectories and Constraints team.
Members
The Care Trajectories and Constraints team is led by Professor Majella Kilkey at the University of Sheffield.