简介

My research examines the complex intersections of caregiving and power in later life. Drawing on approaches from medical anthropology, social work and feminist anthropology, my work examines the ways that emerging forms of care and everyday care practices shape both intimate and political social relations. I am particularly interested in the ways that care practices naturalize, reproduce or transform social inequalities. My research focuses on the United States, where discourses of productivity and independence crucially shape the social roles and forms of care available to older and disabled adults. I am currently writing up results from a study of social relations in paid home care in Chicago. In this project, I examine the ways that everyday, intimate home care practices sustained older adults’ independence while also naturalizing racial, class and gender inequality. Based on ethnographic research in both home care agencies and elders’ homes, this work argues that independence is a social form defined not so much by the absence of dependent social relations, but by practices that obscure unequal and interdependent relations. My new research examines the ways that government programs that provide care for disabled veterans shape novel ethics of intimate relations while reconfiguring moral relationships between persons and the state.