Le travail du "care" : familles, institutions, situations de crise. – TRAVDUC

The main objective of this program is to study what is at stake in carework, by examining crisis situations and evolution of norms in the context of family life, in order to investigate – and thereby to reformulate – the very idea of care. The program shall focus on conflicts arising about norms of care in relations between relatives, when dealing with young, old, frail, sick and crippled people. The point is to outline the relevance of a new approach of justice for the study of family conflict, whether about matters of division of work and responsibilities for caring for dependent and vulnerable people. The different teams joining in this program are engaged in thinking the various and complex forms of conflicts within the family as being conflicts about norms themselves. This common perspective will allow 1) a re-definition of normative conflicts as explicitation, expression of – not necessarily congruent or compatible – moral norms, rather than a rational outcome of a shared and common normative system; 2) an investigation of the link between professional and non professional activities within the family, one of the main source of conflicts and feelings of injustice, unfairness and other complex and mixed feelings; 3) a general transformation of the general (abstract) moral and political analysis towards a more particularistic approach, sensitive to the affective and expressive dimensions of conflicts, in order to reformulate our conceptions of justice in terms of feelings of injustice. This analysis is designed to outline the moral and economical dimensions of family relations and to connect theses aspects to gender issues. Various academic disciplines (sociology, philosophy, psychology and law) are working together in this perspective. Caring for vulnerable persons, and caring in general, is central to the varieties of family changes. We shall therefore rely on ethnographical fieldwork of specific situations : the emergence and evolution of a care problem, where the relations between families and background institutions, and professional care-givers, appear most clearly. In such moments of crisis, what is at stake is actually the rightness, normality, adequacy of our ways of dealing with dependency, the fairness of the distribution of carework – in a historical context where relations of care cannot be taken for granted anymore. The matter of norms of care – who cares for whom and how – and of the various ways of taking care of the other, of the various ways of either doing yourself or making someone do something for you, requires a detailed account of the varieties of tasks to be fulfilled. A particular attention will be devoted to the gendered dimension of these conflicts about care matters, and to the social relation between hired women and their women employers. Two complementary approaches will be used: an economical ethnography with a careful account of the financial and material aspects of caring, thus able to debate with sociologists studying social policies ; a moral ethnography with a careful account of forms of expression, thus able to bring to a public and political level those private issues which are experienced as practical, relational and moral troubles in everyday life. Moral ethnography and analysis of language should lead to an account of disagreements about the bounds of carework. We expect (and hope) to make more visible the public implications of the various and conflicting norms of care for the dependent and vulnerable, by considering these norms are being worked out and expressed within the relations between relatives. Such a description should allow, and make sense of, public and private recognition of carework-related feelings of injustice.