Assembling the Capacity to Care: Caring-with Precarious Housing - Emma Power

Assembling the Capacity to Care: Caring-with Precarious Housing

Presenter: Dr Emma Power (Institute for Culture and Society)

Discussant: Dr Stephen Healy

In a period when care is being increasingly cast as an individual responsibility there is a need to invigorate analyses of caring capacity, of the factors and relations that make care possible. In this paper I explore care through the experiences of single older women living in precarious housing. Single older women have been recognised as one of the fastest growing groups of homeless people in Australia. For these women precarious housing imperils other domains of domestic provisioning – securing food, paying bills, meeting family responsibilities and achieving even a basic sense of security and belonging.

I develop caring-with as an analytic to guide analyses of caring capacity. Caring-with brings feminist care ethics together with assemblage thinking to develop a topologically sensitive conceptualisation of caring that attends to the depth of emplaced histories, material and political affiliations that shape the capacity and potential for care. Caring-with provides a framework for conceptualising caring capacity in unequal worlds and illuminates the adaptive and creative agencies that generate and hold care together. Empirically I ask how older women care-with precarious housing.

Dr Emma Power is a Senior Research Fellow in the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University. Emma’s research program investigates the interconnection between housing governance and homemaking cultures through analyses of the politics of care and housing security, ageing, home and housing security, and companion animals and urban policy. Emma is an ARC DECRA Fellow. Her project 'Ageing, Home and Housing Security Among Single, Asset-poor Older Women' investigates how housing policy and governance, and ongoing housing mobility, inform how single older women who do not own a home create and maintain a sense of home and security. The project asks how older women can find housing security and a house that is a home. Emma is Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Housing Policyand co-founder of the Housing Journal Podcast.