Coordinating the Youth Caregiver in the United States
Representation, Ambivalence and Slow Violence
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v18i5.1688Keywords:
Youth, caregiving, young carer, slow violence, body multiple, healthAbstract
In this article, I reflect upon Nixon’s (2011) charge to better represent slow violence through the context of youth caregivers in the United States. These youth are invisible in recent efforts to acknowledge the looming national ‘care crisis’. Youth caregivers face a range of barriers to receiving supports, and professionals who interact with youth are largely unaware of the possibility that children and adolescents can be caregivers. I apply an authoethnographic lens to my role as a researcher and advocate explaining my attempts to raise awareness about youth caregiving amongst multiple audiences and through various media. I also discuss how this process of representing and authoring is underpinned with an ambivalence, much of which emerges from creating and stabilizing categories of youth caregivers as a research object. I therefore conclude with a reflection on how ambivalence became a productive partner in representing slow violence through theories of multiplicity, coordination, and epistemic humility/responsibility.
References
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England, Kim. 2010. Home, Work and the Shifting Geographies of Care. Ethics, Place & Environment, 13, 131-150.
England, Kim, and Caitlin Alcorn. 2018. Growing care gaps, shrinking state? Home care workers and the Fair Labor Standards Act. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 11, 443-457.
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England, Kim, and Isabel Dyck. 2012. Migrant workers in home care: Routes, responsibilities, and respect. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 102.5 (2012): 1076-1083.
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MacKenzie, Catrina A., Julia Christensen, and Sarah Turner, 2015. Advocating beyond the academy: dilemmas of communicating relevant research results. Qualitative Research 15, 105-121.
Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The Body Multiple: ontology in medical practice. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2016. Families caring for an aging America. National Academies Press.
Nickels, Margaret, Connie Siskowski, Cynthia N. Lebron, and Julia Belkowitz. 2018. Medication administration by caregiving youth: An inside look at how adolescents manage medications for family members. Journal of adolescence 69: 33-43.
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Olsen, Richard. 1996. Young carers: challenging the facts and politics of research into children and caring. Disability & society 11, 41-54.
Olson, Elizabeth. 2015. Geography and ethics I: Waiting and urgency. Progress in Human Geography 39: 517-526.
Olson, Elizabeth. 2017. ‘The largest volunteer life saving corps in the world’: centering child caregiving in histories of U.S. human security through the Little Mothers’ League.” Social & Cultural Geography. Published on-line 17 August. DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2017.1362585
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Raghuram, Parvarti. 2012. Global care, local configurations: Challenges to conceptualizations of care. Global Networks 12, 155–174.
Rivaux, Stephanie L., Joyce James, Kim Wittenstrom, Donald Baumann, Janess Sheets, Judith Henry, and Victoria Jeffries. 2008. The Intersection of Race, Poverty, and Risk: Understanding the Decision to Provide Services to Clients and to Remove Children. Child Welfare 87, 151-168.
Robson, Elsbeth. 2004. Hidden Child Workers: Young Carers in Zimbabwe. Antipode 36, 227-248.
Rose, Gillian. 1997. Situating knowledges: positionality, reflexivities and other tactics. Progress in human geography, 21(3), 305-320.
Siskowski, C. (2006). Young caregivers: Effects of family health situations on school performance. Journal of School Nursing, 22(3), 163–169.
Spece, Roy G. Jr., David S. Shimm, and Allen E. Buchanan. Eds. 1996. Conflicts of interest in clinical practice and research. New York, Oxford University Press.
Spillers, Hortense J. 1987. Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: An American grammar book. Diacritics 17, 64–81.
Staeheli, Lynn A., and Don Mitchell. 2005. The complex politics of relevance in geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95, 357-372.
The State of Things. 2018. WUNC Radio, May 17. http://www.wunc.org/post/hidden-struggles-and-rewards-youth-caregiving Accessed on 29 January.
Watts, Michael. 1983/2013. Silent Violence. Food, Famine, and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press.
Zelizer, Viviana A. 1994. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Aldridge, Jo, and Saul Becker. 1999. Children as carers: the impact of parental illness and disability on children’s caring roles. Journal of Family Therapy 21, 303-320.
Barusch, Amanda. 2013. The Aging Tsunami: Time for a New Metaphor? Journal of Gerontological Social Work 56, 181-184.
Bhabha, Homi. 1984. Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse. October 28, 125-133.
Butz, David. 2010. Autoethnography as Sensibility. In The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Geography, edited by Dydia DeLyser, Steve Herbert, Stuart Aitken, Mike Crang, and Linda McDowell, 138–155. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Cahill, Caitlin and María Elena Torre. 2007. Beyond the journal article: Representations, audience, and the presentation of participatory research. In Sara Kindon, Rachel Pain and Mike Kesby (Eds.) Participatory Action Research Approaches and Methods: Connecting People, Participation and Place. London: Routledge. 196-205.
Carter, Roslyn. 2008. Addressing the caregiving crisis. Preventing Chronic Disease 5. http://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2008/ jan/07_0162.htm. Accessed September 13, 2018.
Dahl, Hanne Marlene. 2017. Struggles In (Elderly) Care: A Feminist View. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
England, Kim. 2010. Home, Work and the Shifting Geographies of Care. Ethics, Place & Environment, 13, 131-150.
England, Kim, and Caitlin Alcorn. 2018. Growing care gaps, shrinking state? Home care workers and the Fair Labor Standards Act. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 11, 443-457.
England, Kim, and Isabel Dyck. 2011. Managing the body work of home care. Sociology of Health & Illness 33, 206-219.
England, Kim, and Isabel Dyck. 2012. Migrant workers in home care: Routes, responsibilities, and respect. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 102.5 (2012): 1076-1083.
Evans, Ruth. 2011. Youth Caregiving and HIV in the UK: Caring Relationships and Mobilities in African Migrant Families. Population, Space and Place, 17, 338-360.
Evans, Ruth. 2014. Children as Caregivers. Ben-Arieh, A., Casas, F., Frones, I, Korbin, J.E. (Eds.) Handbook of Child Well-Being, (1893-1916). Springer.
Fisher, Berenice, and Joan Tronto. 1990. Toward a feminist theory of caring. In, Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson (eds) Circles of care: Work and identity in women’s lives. 35-62.
Fruhauf, Christine A., Shannon E. Jarrott, and Katherine R. Allen. 2006. Grandchildren’s Perceptions of Caring for Grandparents. Journal of Family Issues 27, 887–911.
Gastfried, Jody. 2018 (July 25). The Cost of Caregiving: Meet the Millennials Taking A Second (Unpaid) Shift. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jodygastfriend/2018/07/25/the-cost-of-caregiving-meet-the-millennials-taking-a-second-unpaid-shift/#9fa572529ff7 Accessed August 13, 2018.
Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. 2010. Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Greene, Jennifer, Donna Cohen, Constance Siskowski, and Peter Toyinbo. 2017. The relationship between family caregiving and the mental health of emerging young adult caregivers. The journal of behavioral health services & research 44: 551-563.
Haraway, Donna. 1988. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies 14, 575-599.
Ho, Anita. 2011. Trusting experts and epistemic humility in disability. IJFAB: International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 4, 102-123.
Jenkins, Jo Ann. 2018 (May 29) Millennials and Caregiving? Yes, It’s a Thing. Family Caregiving https://www.aarp.org/caregiving/home-care/info-2018/millennial-caregivers-work-life.html Accessed August 13, 2018.
Kavanaugh, Melinda and Megan Howard. 2018. Real Kids Talk about ALS ALS Society of America. http://www.alsa.org/assets/pdfs/youth-guide1.pdf Accessed 29 January 2019.
Kearns, Robin A., and Alun E. Joseph. 1997. Restructuring health and rural communities in New Zealand. Progress in Human Geography 21, 18-32.
Kittay, Eva Feder. 2008. Ideal Theory Bioethics and the Exclusion of People with Severe Cognitive Disabilities. In Naturalized Bioethics: Toward Responsible Knowing and Practice, edited by Hilde Lindemann, Marian Verkerk and Margaret Urban Walker, 218–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lawson, Victoria. 2007. Geographies of Care and Responsibility. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 27, 1-11.
Lakoff, George and Sam Ferguson. 2006. The Framing of Immigration. The Rockridge Institute, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0j89f85g Accessed January 15, 2019.
Leu, Agnes and Saul Becker. 2016. A Cross-national and comparative classification of in-country awareness and policy responses to ‘young carers’. Journal of Youth Studies 20, 750-762.
McEwan, Cheryl. and Michael Goodman. 2010. Place Geography and the Ethics of Care: Introductory Remarks on the Geographies of Ethics, Responsibility and Care. Ethics, Place and Environment 13, 103-112.
MacKenzie, Catrina A., Julia Christensen, and Sarah Turner, 2015. Advocating beyond the academy: dilemmas of communicating relevant research results. Qualitative Research 15, 105-121.
Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The Body Multiple: ontology in medical practice. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2016. Families caring for an aging America. National Academies Press.
Nickels, Margaret, Connie Siskowski, Cynthia N. Lebron, and Julia Belkowitz. 2018. Medication administration by caregiving youth: An inside look at how adolescents manage medications for family members. Journal of adolescence 69: 33-43.
Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Olsen, Richard. 1996. Young carers: challenging the facts and politics of research into children and caring. Disability & society 11, 41-54.
Olson, Elizabeth. 2015. Geography and ethics I: Waiting and urgency. Progress in Human Geography 39: 517-526.
Olson, Elizabeth. 2017. ‘The largest volunteer life saving corps in the world’: centering child caregiving in histories of U.S. human security through the Little Mothers’ League.” Social & Cultural Geography. Published on-line 17 August. DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2017.1362585
Olson, Elizabeth and Connie Siskowski. 2018 (24 January). The U.S. needs to support and recognize youth caregivers. The Hill https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/370578-the-us-needs-to-support-and-recognize-youth-caregivers accessed January 29, 2019.
Raghuram, Parvarti. 2012. Global care, local configurations: Challenges to conceptualizations of care. Global Networks 12, 155–174.
Rivaux, Stephanie L., Joyce James, Kim Wittenstrom, Donald Baumann, Janess Sheets, Judith Henry, and Victoria Jeffries. 2008. The Intersection of Race, Poverty, and Risk: Understanding the Decision to Provide Services to Clients and to Remove Children. Child Welfare 87, 151-168.
Robson, Elsbeth. 2004. Hidden Child Workers: Young Carers in Zimbabwe. Antipode 36, 227-248.
Rose, Gillian. 1997. Situating knowledges: positionality, reflexivities and other tactics. Progress in human geography, 21(3), 305-320.
Siskowski, C. (2006). Young caregivers: Effects of family health situations on school performance. Journal of School Nursing, 22(3), 163–169.
Spece, Roy G. Jr., David S. Shimm, and Allen E. Buchanan. Eds. 1996. Conflicts of interest in clinical practice and research. New York, Oxford University Press.
Spillers, Hortense J. 1987. Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: An American grammar book. Diacritics 17, 64–81.
Staeheli, Lynn A., and Don Mitchell. 2005. The complex politics of relevance in geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95, 357-372.
The State of Things. 2018. WUNC Radio, May 17. http://www.wunc.org/post/hidden-struggles-and-rewards-youth-caregiving Accessed on 29 January.
Watts, Michael. 1983/2013. Silent Violence. Food, Famine, and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press.
Zelizer, Viviana A. 1994. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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Published
2019-10-03
How to Cite
Olson, E. (2019). Coordinating the Youth Caregiver in the United States: Representation, Ambivalence and Slow Violence. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 18(5), 1150–1166. https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v18i5.1688
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Special Issue - Slow Violence (Guest Eds. Caitlin Cahill & Rachel Pain)
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