Who Needs the Experts? The Politics and Practices of Alternative Humanitarianism and Its Relationship to NGOs

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Drawing on fieldwork in Greece, we examine the politics and practices of autonomous volunteering in the context of the...     

Negotiating user preferences, discrimination, and demand for migrant labour in long-term care

The restructuring of long-term care for older people has been marked both by the role of the market and by the role of migrant labor. This article develops the analysis of these processes at the microlevel of the provision of care. It draws on data collected as part of a cross-national comparative study on the employment of migrant care workers in residential care homes and home care services for older people in England and Ireland. The article examines, first, the ways in which divisions of race, ethnicity, and citizenship shape the preferences of service providers/employers and some service users as regards who provides care. Second, it examines how the institutional context of quasi-markets in long-term care shapes the negotiation of demand for migrant labor, the racialized preferences of individual users, alongside the rights of care workers to non-discrimination. It is argued that market-oriented policies for personalization, as well as for cost containment, raise implications for divisions of race, ethnicity, and citizenship in the provision of long-term care. At the same time, those divisions point to the limits of framing care in terms of the preferences of the individual as opposed to the social relations in which care is embedded.     

Gender and free movement: EU migrant women’s access to residence and social rights in the U.K.

This article examines the gendered effects of restricting EU migrants’ access to rights to residence and to social benefits in relation to work, self-sufficiency and family. It draws on the findings of qualitative research on EU migrant women’s access to social benefits in the U.K. on the basis of residence rights as an EU citizen-worker or family member of an EU citizen-worker. The research included qualitative interviews with providers of advice services on social benefits claims and with EU migrant women in the U.K. The findings point to the ways in which the status of the EU citizen-worker is defined and implemented limits women’s access to and ability to maintain that status and, at the same time, their reliance on the status of family member of an EU citizen-worker. Both have gendered effects in terms of women’s potential exclusion from access to residence and social rights as mobile EU citizens.