Time and Agency in the Care/Work Narratives of Families with Disabilities


Karen Foster, Dalhousie University; Laura Fisher, Dalhousie University

There is a large and well-established field of social scientific research that seeks to measure and make sense of how families balance the many and sometimes conflicting claims on their time, and how these claims, and their attendant responses, feelings, negotiations and strategies are gendered. Over time, the field has grown more sensitive to the diversity of families we can try to understand, and the complexity of how households divide up the work that keeps them running. Researchers have showed, for instance, that “time is not time is not time” (Doucet, 2022)--problematizing simplistic time-use calculations–and that gender differences in household and care work are not always the same as gender inequalities (Doucet, 1995). In this paper, we seek to add to this still-expanding field by contemplating how to make space for the positive and negative implications of disability–children’s and parents’--in our analysis of parents’ care/work narratives, with additional attention to how their care/work relations, and the control they have over them, may change and vary over time at multiple scales -- within a day, but also the life course (Elder, 1994). Like a growing number of researchers (Hanisch, 2013; Thomas, 2022), we seek to carve a space between the ‘deficit narrative’ approach that focuses attention on all the ways in which disability limits parents’ and children’s agency and flourishing, and a naive approach that ignores their challenges. Our more specific objectives are to explore the relationships between temporality (at multiple scales) and agency in disabled families’ stories, to help us understand care/work experiences in families with disabilities, and to point to helpful interventions or supports. To that end, we draw on 17 interviews from a larger Canadian cross-national project that includes a national survey (with almost 5000 participants) and a follow-up qualitative research project with selected participants from the survey (with 88 households and 155 participants) on gender divisions and relations between unpaid work and paid work in diverse families. Data collection utilized the Care/Work Portrait (Doucet and Klostermann, 2023), a visual participatory method for exploring how individuals and couples navigate and negotiate all the work that goes into running a household. Data analysis Team-based data analysis work used an adapted version of the Listening Guide approach to narrative analysis.

Non-presenting authors: Andrea Doucet, Brock University

This paper will be presented at the following session: