Brazil

Who Cares? Rebuilding care in a post-pandemic world

 “Who Cares” is a project that investigates how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the practices of care providers and care recipients. It seeks to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the care system that became apparent as governments grappled with finetuning policy responses to the fastmoving coronavirus. The project will contribute to our understanding of care work in rapidly aging societies in a context of increasingly less inclusive social policies. The project seeks to uncover and understand the fragmented and poorly organized matrix of care provision, and identify the subsequent overlapping, inconsistent and at times competing polices and regulations that shape care work and its provision at different levels of governance. Rebuilding a robust and more resilient and equitable care delivery system requires a comprehensive understanding of care economy and entails learning from innovative initiatives around the world.

Six strategic countries

Brazil, Colombia, Canada, France, the United Kingdom, and the US provide important variations in societal characteristics that can be crucial to understanding the different configurations of care across: (i) national governance, (ii) welfare regimes, (iii) the institutionalization of healthcare systems and their jurisdiction over health policy, care employment, working conditions, labor market informality, home healthcare policies, and COVID-19 pandemic policies.

Four Focus Areas

Each team will coordinate their research to generate cross-national comparisons that explore the different dimensions of care in the four strategic focus areas:

(I) Assess the pandemic’s impact of the on the needs and modalities of care by surveying methodologies that can harmonize data for a transnational perspective;

(II) Review labor conditions and rights through a cross-country survey of/with paid care workers;

(III) Situate care as a strategic dimension and pillar for public policies on rebuilding social infrastructureby comparing national and urban experiences;

(IV) Identify care strategies in the event of state failure by conducting local ethnographies focused on the different forms of community solidarity and emerging associations and collective organizations to recognize the largely invisible social practices of actors who contribute to the daily provision of care.