Exploring the potential for mobilizing family carers of older adults in collective care advocacy: preliminary findings from a SSHRC-funded team project


Laura Funk, University of Manitoba

Against the backdrop of inadequate public services, the home care status quo tends to ‘pit’ paid and unpaid carers against each other and strain relationships between older and disabled persons and their family members. This presentation describes an ongoing project exploring the potential for mobilizing unpaid family carers of older adults in collective activism. Our team identified how mainstream family caregiving advocacy reinforces moralizing representations of carers and decenters the role of the state, while re-entrenching divisions between people helping and being helped (Sawchuk et al., Dunsmore, in progress). Building on Levitsky (2014), and using a feminist rhetorical approach (Klostermann, 2019), we are exploring how and in what conditions family carers of older adults engage in everyday politicization and solidarity as they talk about their experiences. Preliminary findings from interviews in Winnipeg identify challenges in this regard among carers feeling particularly stuck in fraught familial relationships and difficult conditions. Yet there were also glimpses of possibility as participants variously resisted organizational expectations, set emotional and practical boundaries, contemplated the ‘end’ of their role, and imagined radically different care futures for older adults. Although problematic relationships with persons they were helping (or paid workers) complicates care, it does not preclude collective allyship, especially among carers who are themselves aging or facing other structured vulnerabilities. We conclude by discussing the complexities of intervening in conversations with carers in ways that engage them as allies in radical grassroots collective action that promotes racial, migrant, class and gender equity.

This paper will be presented at the following session: