Gender, Migration, & The Work of Care

Book Release: Home Care Fault Lines by Cynthia J. Cranford

One of our project leaders, Professor Cynthia Cranford’s research bridges the areas of work, gender, and migration. She recently released a new book investigating these issues entitled Home Care Fault Lines: Understanding Tensions and Creating Alliances.

From the Cornell University Press: In this revealing look at home care, Cynthia J. Cranford illustrates how elderly and disabled people and the immigrant women workers who assist them in daily activities develop meaningful relationships even when their different ages, abilities, races, nationalities, and socioeconomic backgrounds generate tension. As Cranford shows, workers can experience devaluation within racialized and gendered class hierarchies, which shapes their pursuit of security.

Cranford analyzes the tensions, alliances, and compromises between security for workers and flexibility for elderly and disabled people, and she argues that workers and recipients negotiate flexibility and security within intersecting inequalities in varying ways depending on multiple interacting dynamics.

What comes through from Cranford’s analysis is the need for deeply democratic alliances across multiple axes of inequality. To support both flexible care and secure work, she argues for an intimate community unionism that advocates for universal state funding, designs culturally sensitive labor market intermediaries run by workers and recipients to help people find jobs or workers, and addresses everyday tensions in home workplaces.


Reviews

“Cynthia Cranford presents a compelling and nuanced analysis of the multifaceted conflict arising from inadequate support programs. Recognizing both provider and receiver are potentially vulnerable populations, Home Care Fault Lines is a must-read for coalition building with the elderly, disabled and immigrant workers.”

Mary Romero, author of Introducing Intersectionality

“Home Care Fault Lines takes a well-grounded research design, evaluates it in light of a wide interdisciplinary reading of care, labor, disability, immigration, race, social movements, and other related literatures, and comes up with a model for change that builds upon what already has happened to envision new possibilities.”

Eileen Boris, University of California, Santa Barbara


Pre-order Home Care Fault Lines: Understanding Tensions and Creating Alliances here.