Reimagining Care In Turbulent Times: Toward a Sociology of Social Care

This session examines how sociological knowledge can be mobilized to advance caregiving practices under conditions of growing social and economic turbulence. Care has historically been privatized within families and feminized as unpaid labor, while neoliberal restructuring has increasingly commodified care, transforming it into a market-based service stratified by class and access. Simultaneously, processes of professionalization have consolidated authority within medical and social service domains, marginalizing lay actors as “informal caregivers” despite their central role in everyday care regimes.

These intersecting dynamics produce uneven care landscapes marked by intensified burdens, temporal dispossession, and moral pressures on informal caregivers, who are often expected to provide continuous care without adequate recognition or support. This session adopts a clinical sociology perspective to critically interrogate these conditions and to explore pathways for intervention and transformation.

We invite contributions that analyze care arrangements across scales, from household to transnational networks; uncover mechanisms of exclusion and dependency; and critically evaluate interventions that challenge dominant care models. Particular attention is given to initiatives that redistribute care through community-based practices, hybrid knowledges, and participatory forms of intervention.

Bringing together scholars, practitioners, and community actors, this session advances the concept of social care as a theoretically grounded and practice-oriented alternative. By re-centering relationality, reciprocity, and collective responsibility, it seeks to reimagine caregiving beyond market logics and professional monopolies in turbulent times.