The struggle to provide: how poverty is experienced in the context of family care

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that we look through the lens of family care to show how economic scarcity translates into an actual experience of everyday life. Referring to analyses from narrative interviews with people in deprived life circumstances who live across the UK and the Republic of Ireland, I introduce care work as one situational context in which precarious living conditions become tangible for my interviewees. In addition, I demonstrate that gendered expectations concerning mother- and fatherhood make a difference for how women and men experience poverty. Yet, as stereotypical as this may seem, there is more to tell.