Contesting care imaginaries: reflections on epistemic opportunities in shaping alliances and campaigns to seek a sustainable and careful society in Ireland.

In this reflection I draw from my previous research on the topography and dynamics of coalitions shaping the social politics of care in Ireland to raise questions about the role epistemic political opportunities may play in securing a sustainable and caring societal and policy settlement. Research on alliances between and campaigns by family carers, home care actors (including public and private providers), migrant workers, and trade unions mobilizing for feminized care professions reveal the importance not only of power resources but of institutional imagination, ideational resources, and epistemic power to disrupt state and societal consensus on care. Drawing from social movement theorisation and critical feminist care ethical approaches applied to these varied care campaigns, I have identified hierarchies and contests around what good care should be as well as efforts to maintain care as a private or profitable matter, albeit resourced by public funds. More recent analysis of state led care reforms and proposed constitutional commitments to care has revealed how feminist care ethics have been co-opted and contorted by non-feminist actors in epistemic struggles aimed at shaping the future care imaginary. Across this work I have typologized social discourses on care and their underlying ‘political grammar’ revealing the presence of transformative care centric approaches to public policy but also continuity in commitments to the privatisation of care, hierarchies that maintain low political voice for those in receipt of care and instrumentalization of the gendered and racialised profile of care work. These rely on epistemic strategies that seed societal and political anxieties around migrant labour, the family, gender roles and gender politics that complicate social and political campaigns on care. I assess how we might theorise how the epistemological opportunity context mediates competing constructs of care in ways that open up or close down possibilities to engender alliances to construct a sustainable and careful social and political imaginary.