Claiming and Commoning Care in the City. Solidarity Practices in/through the Feminist Strike Movement in Zurich and Bern

Schilliger, Sarah (2024). Claiming and Commoning Care in the City. Solidarity Practices in/through the Feminist Strike Movement in Zurich and Bern (Submitted). In: ESA Conference (European Sociological Association), Research Stream: Enacting solidarity and citizenship across social fields and scales. University of Porto, Portugal. 28th August 2024.

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Particularly since the pandemic, it has become evident that nation-states and markets have failed to create care infrastructures that guarantee good care and offer decent working conditions. This structural carelessness, manifested above all at local level, has been increasingly addressed by feminist strike movements in recent years. In Switzerland, around 300’000 women took to the streets on 14 June 2023. However, the feminist strike movement is by no means limited to this event but can rather be understood as an ongoing process (Gago 2018) with different forms, scales and sites of politicization of care.
Based on activist ethnographic fieldwork within the feminist strike movement in Bern and Zurich, I explore how childcare workers, networks of mothers and neighborhood collectives challenge the ongoing crisis of social reproduction by both claiming the expansion of public childcare infrastructures and by creating self-organized, collective structures and spaces of childcare within the city.
Solidarity between paid and un(der)paid care workers for the expansion of public care infrastructures and self-organized care commoning in the neighborhood are both elements of a multiplied process of feminist striking. At the micropolitical level, these initiatives can be seen as practical interventions answering to immediate needs in the context of an ongoing care crisis, but also as experimentations with collectively and self-organized forms of care, based in affirmations of interdependency (Tronto 2013) and intensified proximity (Roth/Russell/Thompson 2023). On a broader societal level, these solidarity initiatives not only question the hegemonic division between the public and the private spheres, but also the neoliberal “care fix” strategy which attempts to bridge the care crisis by “offloading the cost of care” to less privileged sectors of society (Dowling 2021).

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Division/Institute:	09 Interdisciplinary Units > Interdisciplinary Centre for Gender Studies (ICFG)
UniBE Contributor:	Schilliger, Sarah Berit
Subjects:	300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology
Language:	English
Submitter:	Sarah Berit Schilliger
Date Deposited:	05 Jun 2024 14:50
Last Modified:	05 Jun 2024 14:50
URI:	https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/197546