On Care as Promiscuous

This dossier on care comprises a series of short posts from speakers at our Roundtable on Care, co-badged with the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships (CRFR) and convened during the visit we hosted for members of UGEN. 

by Dr. Shruti Chaudhry

For the last few years, I have been working with minority ethnic older people in Scotland, specifically people of South Asian heritage. My research grew out of an interest in interrogating ideas around how the South Asian family has been taken to be a “self-fulfilling unit”. The assumption – “they look after their own” – has a long history in Britain and has often informed public and policy discourses. For instance, in 2013, Jeremy Hunt (then Health Secretary) suggested that British families should take a cue from Asian families in caring for their elderly. Stereotypes that cultural values uphold the ideal of family care in practice and that the needs of Asian families are different from the White population further lead to exclusion from service provision. My research was driven by an interest in interrogating these ideas shaped by an understanding that the South Asian family is not an unchanging unit. Recent research on South Asian communities has been documenting the diversification of intimate life, and this emerged in my own research too. This raises new questions for family life and ageing, especially within culturally diverse contexts. 

The way in which I have gone about doing my research has been in two parts: the first part has been about mapping care infrastructures, where I have looked at the ways in which the people I worked with interact with the state or statutory services, voluntary organisations, faith-based and community groups. But I've also looked at the perspectives of care providers who cater specifically to minority communities, but also how more mainstream services interact with/or not with these communities. 

The second and main part of my research has been about the relationships of care that were important in my participants’ lives. This has very much been driven by an interest in looking at how caring personal relationships are important for health and well-being. Taking inspiration from Lynn Jamieson’s work, I see care as a “practice of intimacy”. There are two points that I want to make from my own research as well as thinking about care research more broadly and future agendas of care. In the first, I draw on the idea of “promiscuous care” from the Care Collective that makes a case for expanding our circles of care by multiplying the number of people we care for. This idea seeks to offer an alternative to neoliberal understandings of care, i.e. care for yourself and care for those like yourself. I'm drawing on this idea because we saw evidence of this idea of promiscuous care in practice during the Covid-19 pandemic. From my own experience of working with minority communities, one of the important observations that I made was how the mutual aid, voluntary and community organisations that rallied together to support communities and individuals were very much catering to specific needs that were tailored to the needs of specific communities. This is really crucial because for decades, what has come up repeatedly in discussions of care around minority communities, and remains a concern, is the issue of culturally appropriate services and needs. The point that I wish to make is that while on the one hand, we saw a hopeful alternative that did seem to work in practice, on the other, we also saw the limits of that kind of model in terms of its long-term sustainability and I think I would like to reiterate the point that care and caring need to be enabled and resourced properly. 

The second thing that I wanted to talk about, which relates to my research on personal relationships, is the importance of friendship, which emerged as an extremely important relationship in my participants’ lives. This is important because there has not been much writing on friendship amongst South Asian communities, specifically older people, and this is a neglect that has been noted more widely for black and minority ethnic people in the UK more generally. This is also tied in with policy agendas around social isolation and loneliness. 

I want to conclude with an empirical observation from my work that I find hopeful, i.e., the existence of friendships across social boundaries, so cross-gender friendships, but crucially those across racial and cultural boundaries. These are long-standing friendships which have lasted over decades. This speaks to stereotypes about long settled migrant communities being self-segregating but also I want to connect this back to the neoliberal understandings of care that propagate not only caring for yourself and your own, but also not caring for others who are different. But my research provides evidence of people doing the work of sustaining caring relationships with others who are different from them over decades. These kinds of everyday practices of care need more attention, because I think they point to possibilities for more hopeful futures and social change.

About the Author

Dr. Shruti Chaudhry is a Chancellor's Fellow in sociology and co-director of the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships (CRFR). She completed a PhD in sociology from the University of Edinburgh in 2016. She is the author of Moving for Marriage: Inequalities, Intimacy and Women's Lives in Rural North India (SUNY Press) which was shortlisted for the British Association for South Asian Studies (BASAS) Book Prize 2023, and co-editor of Gender in South Asia and Beyond (with Zubaan: New Delhi, with Hugo Gorringe and Radhika Govinda).