Finance and care

Abstract

The papers in this collection explore how people make use of financial practices and institutions to organize, extend, and manage care relations. Much work in the social sciences views financial practices and money as corrosive to social relations. Our research uses situated ethnography and qualitative interviews to gain insights into how people use finance to practice, contest, and organize care in their families and communities. Such approaches alert us to the significant potentialities of finance in creating, sustaining and transforming relations, and to the central roles of financial discourses, practices, and institutions in structuring contemporary social arrangements. Ethnographically informed accounts of how people in Kenya, Vietnam, the United States, Brazil, and Tanzania engage with health insurance, home-based care, cash-based social assistance, caring for animals and crowdfunding highlight the constitutive relations between finance and care in diverse settings. By exploring how people use finance to organize, negotiate, and transform care, we show how financial products, services, and narratives are used creatively to practice care and to make claims about caring for others. Insights into people's everyday interactions around caring, money, and finance reveal the life worlds and values which inform people's relations and give care and money meaning.