Families and the Care Crisis

Session Submission Type: Paper Session (90 minute)

Description

This session will examine how families are navigating and responding to the global care crisis. Rising costs, uneven access to childcare and eldercare, and the erosion of public supports are reshaping family life and deepening inequities. This session seeks to highlight new research on how families navigate, reproduce, and resist the burdens of care under conditions of austerity and marketization. Papers may explore topics such as social reproduction, racialized and gendered divisions of care labor, intergenerational support, and state and market interventions in family care. Submissions that address variation across race, class, gender, and national contexts are especially encouraged. Together, the papers in this session will illuminate how family structures both respond to and are transformed by the ongoing crisis of care.

Sub Unit

• Family Section / Families and the Care Crisis

Presider

• Ken Chih-Yan Sun, Villanova University

Individual Presentations

• Cruel Interdependency: Rethinking Care, Dependency, and Relational Constraint through Young Carers in Contemporary China - Kefan Xue

• Market Movers: High-Income Mothers in the Crisis of Care - Jennifer Woltil Bouek, University of Delaware

• The Cumulative Devaluation of Care: Gendered Lifetime Economic Consequences of Paid and Unpaid Care Work - Emily Curran, University of Pennsylvania

• Towards Caregiver Flourishing: A Framework for Sustainable Capacity in Dementia Care - Cameron Gabriel Beckett, University of Chicago

• Who’s On Call? The Role of Grandparents in Working Mothers’ Labor Market Participation and Well-Being - Shiya Wang, Columbia Business School; Alicia Modestino; Hannah Bowles, Harvard Kennedy School

Session Organizer

• Loren M Beard, Harvard University