‘Te lo tienes que currar’ : enacting an ethics of care in times of austerity
Abstract
Amid austerity policies that have retracted welfare programs and have affected the livelihood of people in Spain, this paper describes how various local practices of care among members of the PAH (Platform for People Affected by Mortgages) work to recuperate social relations morally and practically. I seek to understand the relationship between people’s perceptions of social justice and notions of fairness on the one hand and ideas about deservingness on the other. I am interested in exploring who gets to choose and allocate, and how people in the PAH use the collective notion of care to justify their choice. What are the moral conflicts that people experience while judging and constructing the figure of the deserving versus the undeserving framed within a collective struggle for social justice? I analyse the conundrums of a movement that struggles to find a balance between individual judgments and the collective good; I aim to show the dilemmas and contradictions of the struggle for social justice.
Citation
Gutierrez Garza , A P 2020 , ' ‘Te lo tienes que currar’ : enacting an ethics of care in times of austerity ' , Ethnos , vol. Latest Articles . https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2019.1687541
Publication
Ethnos
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0014-1844Type
Journal article
Description
This research was funded by Grant ES/M003825/1 from the Economic and Social Research Council of the United Kingdom for the project ‘An ethnography of advice: Between market, society and the declining welfare state’, which I gratefully acknowledge.Collections
Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.