Crisis,care work,and carceral geographies: A case for an Ethics of Crisis Care

Abstract

We analyze the ways in which the Covid-19 crisis expanded and reconfigured care work in nursing homes, and how pressures emanating from the state served to intensify practices of control over “unruly” disabled residents, transforming nursing homes into sites of carcerality. Through interviews with care workers in nursing home facilities across the United States in 2021, we reveal that crises of the state rupture the moral boundaries of care and care work. The immense pressures on nursing home workers that are exacerbated during crises led us to develop an ethics of crisis care, a critical framework to understand how care workers are pushed to engage in messy and carceral practices as a response to surveillance from the state and their workplaces. We conclude with a discussion of how critical attention to an ethics of crisis care can be an effective mode to unpack the intersectional pressures of care work during crisis and to envision less carceral, more just spaces for the care of older, disabled people.