Convenors-Ricardo Rodrigues, Lisbon School of Economics and Management, University of Lisbon and Norah Keating, Centre for Innovative Ageing, Swansea University

Recent theoretical and empirical research has begun to illustrate trajectories of care across time, including pathways into care and diverse patterns of care across the broad sweep of the lives of carers. This life course perspective positions care as a life course domain that intersects with other life courses including families and employment. It augments the considerable body of knowledge of care work and consequences of family carers at particular points in time and in reference to a single care episode such as caring for a parent, spouse or child with disabilities. Taking a life course perspective allows for interrogating questions of how gender, social class and ethnicity might influence cumulative advantage/disadvantage across the life course. This work on pathways into and across care has been grounded in discourses and data from the global north and in pathways of family care. Little is known about care pathways of people in the global south or of the ways in which paid carers enter into care work and how their care careers evolve or are truncated over time. 

We invite papers from diverse regions and from scholars at all career stages that focus on experiences or activities of family carers or care workers across time. Topics may include cumulative disadvantages across the life-course or how care transitions are influenced by interactions with family or employment.  We welcome papers that engage with questions of pathways into paid care or precarity of their employment. Empirical research may be underpinned by either qualitative or quantitative research methods, but should in any case be framed by theoretical concepts and demonstrate how it contributes to strengthening the theoretical knowledge base around care across the life course.