Transformation of informal elder care practices and mobilities during the pandemic

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed that when formal care services closed down, informal care burden was unequally transferred to women. Women across the world became part of “caregiver pools”. Using textual archive material collected by the Finnish Literature Society, we analyse the transformation of informal elder care practices in Finland. We adopt a care mobility and care process perspective to analyse how informal elder care was transformed due to social distancing measures that restricted ageing individuals and their family members’ local and translocal mobilities. We find that over 70-year-olds had to adapt their daily mobilities according to risk assessment. Caregiving provided by mostly female family members was replaced by digital care at a distance, which reinforced existing inequalities in care. We argue that the pandemic simultaneously brought about both a time–space compression and what we call a time–space expansion that affected the everyday practices and mobilities of care.

KEYWORDS:

• Care mobility
• Digital care at a distance
• Gendered care
• COVID-19
• Informal elder care
• Pandemic

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Future Challenges in the Nordics programme [grant number 4709573].