WHO CARES? REBUILDING CARE IN A POST-PANDEMIC WORLD

The pandemic has highlighted the centrality of care as a necessary service performed by care workers that affects everyone. Our proposal will analyze how this focus on care has affected the practices of both care providers and care recipients, and how it has influenced social policies. Broadening our focus through international comparisons reveals how the Covid experience provides lessons in the medium and long-term.

Comparisons will proceed along four main axes, comprising different dimensions and approaches, reflecting the interdisciplinary team profile:

(i) The impact of the pandemic on needs and modalities of care provision: surveying alternative methodologies to harmonize data in a transnational perspective. (ii) Labor conditions and rights in a post pandemic world: transnational analysis of/with paid care workers.

(iii) Care as a strategic dimension and pillar for public policies on social infrastructure rebuilding: comparing national and urban experiments. (iv) Caring strategies when the state fails: qualitative analysis of care provision on vulnerable communities.

Defining axes is a way to intersect and integrate the research agendas from the different national teams, taking advantage of their competences to achieve an organized cross- fertilization of ideas and methods. Our selection of countries and teams will achieve two main goals. First, Brazil, Colombia, Canada, France, UK and the US provide enough variation in societal characteristics crucial to understanding the different configurations of care across national governance, welfare regime, health-care system institutionalization and jurisdiction over health policy, care employment, working conditions of care workers, level of labor market informality, home health-care policies, and Covid-19 pandemic policies.

Second, the principal researchers of each national team have national and comparative care expertise and previous experience in collaborative research. The project leverages the local relevance of the foci from different axes as a strength of the research design. While each country team takes responsibility for an in-depth analysis of one main axis, our cross-cutting research strategy uncovers the mechanisms that reveals significant differences in the observed situations