COVID and Care: dynamics of care in pandemic times. (Co-Care)

Care - both as a specific work performance, but also as an interpersonal relationship - was already a politically and socially problematic, often precarious, hardly visible and thus crisis-ridden area before the pandemic. During the pandemic, a "crisis within the crisis" emerged: the existing crisis of care within the crisis of the pandemic.

The Co-Care project starts from this "crisis within the crisis" and analyzes the tension between the overload, precariousness and invisibility on the one hand and the society-sustaining importance of care on the other hand. The overall goal is to find new ways and means to make care and the care-givers and care-receivers acting in these contexts visible and to strengthen them permanently. For this purpose, the significance, need and resources of care dynamics for a post-pandemic society - which may re-enter further crises - will be elaborated. Further, the empirical studies on professional cleaning and socio-pedagogical family assistance and ethical take-aways will be reified  . Co-Care thus addresses the urgent need for research that clarifies at which points of the pandemic were care arrangements destabilized, which needs but also resources can be discovered here, and how can care dynamics be strengthened for everyday life. The latter is key so that in anothercrisis, the fields of care can function not as a crisis in the crisis, but above all as a resource in the crisis.

Besides the Ethics Centre, research partners in Co-Care are the Department of Social Pedagogy at Tübingen University and the Department of Sociology at LMU.

The Dialogue Forum organized by the Co-Care project took place on 30 and 31 July 2024. As part of the event, we discussed the initial findings of our research within the project group on the first day and with invited participants on the second day. The dialog forum provided an interactive platform for the exchange of knowledge between experts from inside and outside academia. It also enabled participants to pass on their experiences and gain inspiration for their own practice.

On May 23rd 2024, Ali Simon gave a lecture entitled 'Transforming Spaces - The Interplay of Care, Housing, and Cleaning Work in the Pandemic Era' at the international conference 'Imaginaries and Strategies for Good Care and Good Housing in Times of Transformation' at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. The content was about the interplay between housing, professional cleaning and care, with a particular focus on the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, which underlined the critical need for cleanliness and officially designated cleaning as “systemically relevant”.

On April 22, a virtual project meeting was held together with the DLR project management organization. The project members exchanged initial results from the interview study material and image analyses and planned further events for 2024.

The joint project kick-off took place at Hohentübingen Castle on March 6 and 7. In addition to the project consortium, the associated project partners also joined the event.