culture and markets of care

My research is concerned with understanding how cultural and material forces shape markets of care, particularly for the elderly. My book project Chasing Independence: How Culture Shapes Aging in America (under contract with Princeton University Press) interrogates independence as a remarkably undisputed goal for old age—one that fuses ideas about what is best for the elderly with ideas about fiscal responsibility. Drawing on ethnography, interviews, and archival material, I show the work individuals and institutions invest in creating morally acceptable ways of inhabiting dependency as old people start to require care. I have also studied markets of care in the Global South, in a project that explores the relationship of class privilege to the cultural legitimation of assisted living organizations in Santiago de Chile, where I grew up.

care work and affective labor

I am deeply interested in what care work can tell us about contemporary transformations and experiences of labor. My earlier research explored the subjective experiences of time for family caregivers as they were constantly “on call” for an elderly relative. Most recently, I wrote about post-acute care workers’ jobs of managing patients’ “insurance trajectories” along with their treatment. And in this review article I evaluate various theoretical approaches to the entanglements between affect and labor in late capitalism.

healthcare sharing economies

My current research focuses on medical cost-sharing organizations whose participants make monthly contributions to a common fund in order to distribute certain medical expenses among them. Using in-depth interviews and digital ethnography, I seek to answer three questions: (1) What economic relationships and affective meanings are built between members who share medical costs? (2) What capacity do these platforms have to constitute an economy in which not only goods but also risks and vulnerabilities are shared? (3) How are sharing economy technologies and discourses impacting access to healthcare in the context of soaring medical debt in the U.S.?