Emma Dowling: The Care Crisis: What Caused It and How Can We End It?

Abstract

What is care and who is paying for it?
Valuing care and care work does not simply mean attributing care work
more monetary value. To really achieve change, we must go so much
further.
As the world becomes seemingly more uncaring, the calls for people to be
more compassionate and empathetic towards one another—in short, to
care more—become ever-more vocal. The Care Crisis challenges the idea
that people ever stopped caring, but also that the deep and multi-faceted
crises of our time will be solved by simply (re)instilling the virtues of
empathy. There is no easy fix.
In this groundbreaking book, Emma Dowling charts the multi-faceted
nature of care in the modern world, from the mantras of self-care and what
they tell us about our anxieties, to the state of the social care system. She
examines the relations of power that play profitability and care off in
against one another in a myriad of ways, exposing the devastating impact
of financialisation and austerity.
The Care Crisis enquires into the ways in which the continued off-loading of
the cost of care onto the shoulders of underpaid and unpaid realms of
society, untangling how this off-loading combines with commodification,
marketisation and financialisation to produce the mess we are living in. The
Care Crisis charts the current experiments in short-term fixes to the care
crisis that are taking place within Britain, with austerity as the backdrop. It
maps the economy of abandonment, raising the question: to whom care is
afforded? What would it mean to seriously value care?