Care, advice and migration in Spain
In 2016-2018 I carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Madrid to explore how new actors were providing advice and various forms of care to those who are facing precarious living conditions prompted by severe adjustment austerity policies caused by the global financial crisis in 2007-2008. I focused on an analysis of the various forms of collective care that the social movement called the PAH, or Plataforma de Afectados por las Hipotecas (Platform for people affected by Mortgages) offer to people affected by the mortgage crisis created by the predatory lending for homeownership. Following my focus on the politics of care, I want to further investigate the ways in which migrants and organisations (third sector, NGOs, private businesses) interact daily while receiving and offering advice. The research raises larger political and ethical questions of care about how divergent ideological, moral, economic and cultural values are negotiated in contexts of austerity. This is an ethnographic driven project grounded on an intersectional analysis of gender, race/ethnicity and class within advice settings to understand: first, the nuances and differentiated ways in which migrants experience and respond to precarity and second, how these social categories create interdependent systems of exclusion/ inclusion (and care) among disadvantaged groups.