On Friday 4th April the ISS21 SHAPE and CARE21 research clusters will host a seminar on the marketisation of care and emerging approaches to care. The seminar will include presentations unpacking the marketisation of long-term care in Ireland; the lived experience of care markets; and care co-operative approaches to care provision. 

Papers

Marketisation trends in Irish long-term care, Professor Julien Mercille, UCD.

This talk will trace the marketisation of long-term care in Ireland over the last several decades. In particular, the recent trend of private equity involvement will be discussed and illustrated.

Care co-operatives: An alternative organisational model in a marketised care sector, Dr Carol Power, UCC.

This talk will examine the emergence of innovative, community-based co-operative organisations in response to problems inherent in an increasingly marketised care sector.  In contrast to profit-driven care providers, the foundational purpose of care co-operatives is to provide a better experience for those at the centre of caring relationships, i.e. those who receive care, family carers and paid care workers.  The extent to which such organisations can assert and maintain their distinctiveness in the context of their integration into the wider care system will be considered.  

Living and feeling care markets: disabled people’s everyday negotiation of supports for community living, Dr Claire Edwards, UCC. 

 Despite longstanding calls for disabled people to live independent lives, personal supports for disabled people in Ireland continue to be provided within an environment characterized by resource constraint and a fragmented landscape of welfare provision in which private sector entities play an increasing role. In this presentation, I draw on the CareVisions project to explore the everyday affective dynamics of navigating these care landscapes – and in particular, the increasing marketisation and commodification of care – as they are experienced by disabled people. Marketisation is manifest in and arguably shapes disabled people’s negotiation of supports for community living in multiple ways, including battles for scarce and diminishing resources; dilemmas about how to navigate fragmented and opaque service configurations; and sensitivities in negotiating intimate interpersonal support relationships. What becomes evident in disabled people’s narratives is the significant emotional labour created and vested in such negotiations. I suggest that it is vital to unpick some of the affective dynamics created in and through care markets, not least as a way of thinking critically about alternative care futures which challenge and move beyond marketized welfare configurations.

Speaker Bios

• Julien Mercille is a professor in the School of Geography at UCD where he works on the marketisation of social and health care from a political economy perspective. Other parts of his work focus on geopolitics. He is the owner of two small dogs who don't help him very much in his research.
• Dr Carol Power is a Lecturer at Cork University Business School and Senior Researcher with the Centre for Co-operative Studies, UCC.  Her research interests focus on the social economy and the care sector, with particular interest in co-operative models.  Carol is the UCC PI on the recently commenced 4-year Horizon Europe-funded project, Driving Inclusive Care: Economic Democracy and Social Economy (DICES).  She has also been PI on IRC/Research Ireland-funded projects, including, most recently,  the CO-AGE project on care co-operatives, completed in 2024, and the ASPIRE project, which explores the role of social economy initiatives in supporting ageing in place.
• Dr. Claire Edwards is Senior Lecturer in the School of Applied Social Studies, UCC. Her research sits at the intersection of social geography, critical disability studies and social policy, and she is concerned with exploring the socio-spatial dynamics of disablism and ableism as they affect disabled people’s lives. Most recently, she led a 3 year project entitled CareVisions with colleagues in UCC, exploring how we might re-envision care relations in Ireland following the COVID-19 pandemic.

The seminar will be chaired by Dr Monica O'Mullane (SHAPE Cluster Convenor) and Dr Carol Kelliher (CARE21 Convenor).