Following Diddier Fassin´s concept of ‘moral economies,’ the talk will analyze the moral status of decisions made concerning the pandemic measures and the related circulation of 16 values, sentiments, and emotions. It also will explore ‘everyday economies’ manifested through ordinary practices and the shared experiences of care workers with new virus prevention norms, and elucidate how Czech care workers coped with the introduction of new biopolitical measures at the borders and how the pandemic regulations (including testing and vaccination policy) affected their cross-border mobility, which before this had allowed them to coordinate care work in Germany with personal and family life in the Czech Republic.
Additionally, the talk will focus on the role of social media platforms, which played a crucial role in the virtual support and dissemination of pandemic information, knowledge and individual and collective resistance related to specifics of the mobility of senior care in times of risk.
Keywords: care migration, biopolitics, moral economy, senior care, CEE
About our visiting scholar: Petra Ezzeddine is a social anthropologist and an assistant professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague. Her research focuses on gender in migration, transnational care practices, globalization of senior care, ageing in migration and applied anthropology.
She is a member of the editorial board for Gender a Výzkum/Gender and Research. Recently she started to work with her team on new international research (including UvA colleagues Franca van Hooren and Kristine Krause) within the Volkswagen Foundation funded project CareOg: „Researching the transnational organization of senior care, labour and mobility in Central and Eastern Europe”. CareOrg will investigate the intersections between Intra-EU mobility, care drain and care gain within and from CEE countries, foregrounding the meso level of organizing senior care work to offer lessons on how to develop sustainable and decent care work in and across Europe.
