European long‐term care systems increasingly depend on regularly commuting live‐in care workers from Central and Eastern Europe, yet the mobility infrastructures sustaining this labour remain largely overlooked. This article examines bounded transport, an emic term used by Slovak live‐in care workers, brokerage agencies, and transport providers to describe agency‐organised door‐to‐door transport between workers’ homes and care recipients in Austria. It argues that bounded transport constitutes a critical yet invisible infrastructure of transnational care, organising labour mobility while redistributing temporal, financial, and bodily risks. Drawing on policy analysis, online ethnography, advocacy materials, and semi‐structured interviews, the article demonstrates how repeated fatal transport accidents transformed an ordinary feature of cross‐border care into a site of social contestation and collective action. By conceptualising mobility as an integral component of care rather than its external condition, the article contributes to debates on long‐term care governance and mobility justice by showing how live‐in care workers transform experiences of invisibility and vulnerability into claims for recognition and solidarity in the governance of European care regimes.
This thematic issue explores the complex processes and outcomes of transnational care economies in Central and Eastern Europe. It shifts the analytical gaze to this region, foregrounding silences around care gaps, the emergence of new actors alongside largely indifferent welfare states, dynamics of professionalization and precarization, and the entanglements of paid and unpaid work within families and communities. The contributions trace movements from, to, and within Ukraine, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Austria, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. In addition, the issue asks how sustainable mobile care is and considers future scenarios of senior care in Europe.
This article explores how Ukrainian migrant care workers in Italy imagine their own future care in older age while sustaining aging societies through paid work. The analysis is conceptually grounded in the critique of gendered transnational care chains. We ask how women working in senior care define sustainable care for themselves, how these visions relate to their professional trajectories and transnational family experiences, and how they negotiate dignity and security in later life. Empirically, the study draws on 16 biographical interviews with Ukrainian women aged between 37 and 72, conducted in Italy in 2024. We argue that a prolonged engagement in senior care produces both a critical awareness of care inequalities and volatile prospects for their own old age. This results in individualized strategies alongside emerging collective imaginaries of self‐organized care.
This article examines the information behaviour of a group of students housed in an “open” prison in southern England and enabled to attend university during weekdays. This group faces unique challenges, unexplored in existing studies on incarcerated distance learners, as they experience intermittent online access alongside specific restrictions. The study aims to explore their information behaviours, including how digital literacies develop over time, and evaluate the support provided by university staff to generate recommendations for similar prison–university partnerships. Data from weekly reflective progress logs and follow‐up interviews with incarcerated students (𝑛 = 8) are supplemented with interviews with relevant university staff (𝑛 = 5). Theories of digital exclusion, transitional information behaviour, and digital identities inform the analysis. Preliminary findings suggest challenges emerge from the contrast between the restrictive prison information landscape and the digitally intensive university environment, combined with time pressure related to intermittent digital access. Students must continually adapt to new technologies while already immersed in a transition. Prohibitions on smartphones and online networking can lead to social stigma and hinder full participation in the student community. Nonetheless, participants showed strong determination to succeed, which could be supported through targeted support from institutional stakeholders.
Across Central and Eastern Europe, the expansion of formal long‐term care provision has intensified questions regarding the organisation, recognition, and professionalisation of care work. Romania offers a particularly relevant case, as the rapid growth of residential care for older persons has created new institutional spaces where care is increasingly organised as paid work. Despite the legal regulation of occupations in this field, occupational roles overlap in practice, and employers recruit a substantial share of workers without prior qualifications, while skills are acquired through short courses, peer learning, and on‐the‐job experience. This article examines these processes of professionalisation in Romanian nursing homes, focusing on how overlapping roles, emotional labour, and tacit knowledge shape everyday care practice. Drawing on qualitative interviews with care workers and managers in private nursing homes, the findings reveal fluid professional boundaries, with medical, non‐medical, and relational responsibilities frequently overlapping. Professionalisation emerges slowly and unevenly, not through institutional reform or credentialisation alone, but through workers’ everyday adaptation, informal learning, and the practical negotiation of professional roles under conditions of labour shortages and limited institutional support.
Care for older people in Ukraine is an “unpromising domain” of social policy, situated at the bottom of care hierarchies and systematically marginalized through chronic underfunding, weak institutional development, and political invisibility. The provision of care for older adults has been shaped by long‐term demographic aging, neoliberal reforms, and a strongly familialistic care regime, and it relies predominantly on families operating within a fragmented and poorly regulated landscape. Russia’s full‐scale invasion in 2022 has resulted in another devastating blow to structural conditions, not only further destabilizing care infrastructures but also disrupting informal networks of support, rupturing family ties, and deepening inequalities in access to care. In this article, we situate current arrangements within a longer historical trajectory from the Soviet period through to the post‐independence reforms. Relying on statistical data, policy analysis, and 40 in‐depth interviews, we trace how the deprioritization of care for older persons—that is, its decentralization, marketization, and a shift to residual public provision—has produced a fragmented continuum of care rather than a coherent care regime. The war is acting as an amplifier rather than representing a rupture; it is magnifying existing deficits and increasing reliance on unstable ad hoc solutions. These dynamics are profoundly gendered, with middle‐aged and older women bearing disproportionate responsibility for both unpaid and low‐paid care labor. We argue that the persistent framing of care for older people as an unpromising policy domain risks reproducing its marginalization in the postwar reconstruction.
Urban environments are predominantly designed and governed from a human‐centred perspective, largely overlooking the experiences and welfare of animals. Yet cities are shared spaces in which animals live in environments profoundly shaped by human activity. Because of global urbanisation, interspecies interactions will intensify, becoming more frequent and complex. This development raises pressing questions about the welfare of animals in urban contexts and the human responsibility for these animals. While humans hold direct responsibility for domestic animals under their care, such as cats and dogs, we argue that they also bear indirect obligations toward commensal species, such as rats, foxes, and pigeons, whose lives depend on human‐modified habitats. Situating urban animal welfare alongside human wellbeing aligns with the One Welfare framework, which recognises the interdependence of human, animal, and environmental welfare. In contrast to narrower One Health approaches that primarily focus on health risks and biosecurity, One Welfare foregrounds welfare and relationality across species. This article argues that animal welfare should be understood as a constitutive element of urban governance rather than a secondary concern. Drawing on illustrative examples from Belgian cities, the study demonstrates that, to date, animal welfare considerations remain insufficiently integrated into urban governance practices. Therefore, we call for the systematic integration of scientific animal welfare knowledge into urban governance to advance animal welfare. Building on the One Welfare framework, the article advances the concept of “multispecies cities” as part of a broader vision of compassionate urban futures grounded in care and coexistence between humans and animals.
This study examines the psychological well‐being of social workers in Portugal and the emotional, ethical, and institutional dynamics that shape their professional practice within contexts of vulnerability. Drawing on an integrated mixed‐methods design, the research combines a nationwide survey (𝑁 = 1389) using the World Health Organization Well‐Being Index (WHO‐5) with thirteen in‐depth semi‐structured interviews analysed through reflexive thematic analysis. Quantitative findings show that most professionals report adequate well‐being, but 26.3% present low scores, mainly associated with fatigue, reduced energy, and limited rest. Qualitative results deepen this picture, highlighting six interrelated themes: mutual vulnerability in caring relationships, emotional labour and psychosocial strain, institutional barriers to ethical practice, tensions between ideal and real conditions of care, strategies for sustaining professional resilience, professional recognition and collective mobilisation. Participants describe profound emotional resonance with service users, experiences of burnout, and a chronic sense of powerlessness stemming from structural inequalities, resource scarcity, fragmented services, and low professional recognition. Care emerges as relational and ethically demanding, yet structurally constrained. The study argues that workers’ well‐being is inseparable from organisational cultures and socio‐political conditions. Individual coping strategies mitigate strain but cannot compensate for systemic shortcomings. Fostering compassionate institutional ecosystems is therefore an ethical and political imperative.
This article examines the interaction between grassroots care organizations, street‐level bureaucrats, and local public policy as a key interface in the construction and sustainability of local welfare infrastructures. The analysis focuses on the experiences and everyday practices of women leading community‐based care organizations in a suburban district of Greater Buenos Aires, Argentina. These networks have emerged through local policies that link self‐managed grassroots initiatives with municipal governments, mediated by the day‐to‐day practices of street‐level bureaucrats. The resulting care infrastructure produces a spatialized network that is dense in some areas and sparser in others, due to variations in community needs and local concentrations of social vulnerability. Most organizations are led and sustained by women from lower‐income groups who seek to address basic needs unmet by both the public care system and the labor market. This article centers the voices of these women, illuminating their role not only as care workers but also as political actors mediating between communities and the state. Drawing on one‐on‐one interviews conducted remotely during 2021, this research explores the tensions, capacities, and potential of these care networks as vehicles for building transformative forms of social organization and community‐based welfare governance. The study also addresses how gender shapes differences in organizational leadership and management dynamics. Lastly, it reflects on current political and media debates in Argentina that call into question the autonomy of grassroots organizations and the future direction of state‐society relations in care provision.
The transnational care market in Europe is commonly understood as the migration of (mostly) female care workers from East to West. Less attention has been paid to a reverse mobility: older persons relocating from West to East in search of more affordable care. This article presents research on care homes in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary that cater both to local, relatively wealthy seniors and to clients from Germany who move there for care at roughly one‐third of German prices. Although the numbers of such relocated seniors remain low and do not provide a structural solution to Germany’s care crisis, this trend is emblematic of the intensified marketisation of care in Germany and in the receiving countries. It constitutes a distinct formation of exclusive marketisation (available only for those who can afford it) within the evolving European transnational care market. We argue that grasping the multifaceted nature of care outsourcing requires analysing how it is entangled with other forms of mobility and entrepreneurial projects, for example in tourism or construction. By shifting the analysis from Western Europe to the Central and Eastern European (CEE) region, we seek to avoid reproducing power geometries that cast CEE primarily as a reservoir of cheap care labour or as a socio‐economically “deprived” dumping ground for Western problems. Our research underscores the importance of actors beyond family and state in transnational care arrangements and shows how ambiguous German–CEE histories call for a regional, historically attuned perspective on care in an unequal Europe.
This article examines the development and impact of caring communities in a Hungarian town, situating the analysis within debates about the neoliberal restructuring of care and the authoritarian neoliberal state of Hungary. Drawing on Joan Tronto’s ethics of care and various conceptualizations of caring communities as spaces of critical reflection and civic engagement, we investigate how civil society organizations act as facilitators and organizers of the local care landscape. Our empirical focus is a mid‐sized urban center in southern Hungary, where demographic aging, shrinking welfare capacities, and a diverse social environment shape potential stakeholder cooperation. Based on qualitative research methods, including participatory fieldwork, semi‐structured interviews, and focus groups, we analyze how local civil society organizations negotiate their roles in relation to municipal actors and other stakeholders, and the political impact they achieve on local governance through their work. The findings highlight both the potential and the limits of community‐based initiatives: A shift can be observed at the municipal level, where concepts such as conscious aging and empowerment are increasingly recognized. However, civil society organizations are not able to fully prevent the reproduction of existing inequalities, and the participation of older adults remains limited.
Providing senior care is one of the most pressing challenges in a rapidly ageing Europe, particularly in the Central and Eastern European region, which remains largely a care‐sending area. Poland has emerged as a trans‐European hub for long‐term care, acting as a sending, receiving, and transit country, driven by commercial and non‐commercial migrant brokerage. Brokerage actors play a central role in facilitating the employment of live‐in care workers across Europe. In this article, we present an empirical typology of brokerage actors in the care sector, categorising them according to two dimensions: formalisation and commodification. This typology captures a broad range of actors, from informal migrant networks and individual brokers, through semi‐formal actors such as self‐organised caregiver groups and social media platforms, to formalised institutions such as civil society organisations, public employment offices, and commercial agencies. Using this typology, we examine how and why formalised informality is increasing within the care economy, under what circumstances, and with what consequences for carers’ working conditions. While marketisation has introduced formalising effects on enterprises and labour relations, this is not a one‐way path towards decent work. Rather, formalisation itself often generates new forms of informal practices and precarities.
Digital inclusion is increasingly recognised as a critical dimension of social inclusion, particularly in contexts undergoing rapid technological transformation such as China. Despite the Chinese government’s substantial investment in digital infrastructure, equitable access and meaningful participation remain elusive for many incarcerated lived experiencers. Drawing on narrative interviews with 18 people who used heroin and are navigating community‐based rehabilitation after incarceration, this study investigates their everyday encounters with digital exclusion. Through a digital inclusion lens, we identify key barriers, including structural distrust, residual surveillance, and algorithmic classification, which collectively amount to a condition of “digital death.” This form of exclusion is not merely rooted in personal incapacity or behavioural deviance, but rather emerges from institutional silences and systemic absences in both rehabilitation policy and digital governance. We argue that digital inclusion must be integrated into China’s rehabilitation and Huiguishehui (returning to society) frameworks, repositioning it as an essential component of social reintegration and inclusive citizenship.
The evolving crises, contradictions of care, marketisation, and demographic developments are clear, substantial, and inevitable, and are driving social change. In this context, the book Home Care for Sale: The Transnational Brokering of Senior Care in Europe, which highlights some of these contradictions, is essential reading. More importantly, it provides valuable insights. Rather than offering simplistic critiques, we need to consider contradictions because we must understand not only how societies (and vulnerable groups) struggle due to certain institutional arrangements, but also how to find innovative solutions to social problems and care gaps due to social tensions. Few people dare to consider how societies not only collapse, but also innovate under neoliberal stress.
The reentry challenges that formerly incarcerated people (FIPs) face are well‐documented in prior research. However, the digital inequality this population faces has received less consideration in reentry research. In particular, there has been little research conducted to quantitatively assess FIPs’ digital literacy skills and their relationship with demographic and incarceration‐related variables. The current study is exploratory and addresses this limitation by using quantitative data from 73 Black FIPs in Michigan to examine relationships between their digital literacy, demographics, and incarceration‐related variables. The analyses conducted included bivariate correlations, ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions, and post hoc power analyses. The findings reveal that FIPs with more extensive incarceration histories fare worse in terms of the composite digital literacy scale and multiple digital literacy subscales. Age and disability status were also associated with specific digital literacy skill subtypes. These findings suggest that digital literacy skills are shaped by FIPs’ backgrounds, especially their incarceration histories. Thus, FIPs are experiencing a new “digital collateral consequence” of incarceration, resulting in structural barriers to reentry that must be addressed through policy and programming. However, because the posthoc power analysis found that the regression models were underpowered, the need for additional research replicating this study with larger and broader samples cannot be understated.
Migrant care workers from Central and Eastern Europe are essential to Germany’s senior care system, yet their work remains undervalued and poorly regulated. While brokerage agencies often frame live‐in care as a “win‐win solution,” it is characterized by challenging physical and emotional labor, precarious working conditions, low pay, legal ambiguity, and long working hours. Over the past 15 years, the sector has shifted from informal arrangements to a formalized market increasingly dominated by transnational brokerage agencies. These agencies not only recruit and place workers in households, but also offer services such as consulting, lobbying, and increasingly education through specialized training programs for live‐ins, presenting themselves as drivers of professionalization and formalization. However, there are no legally defined qualifications for live‐in carers. To appeal to clients, agencies depict Polish caregivers both as “naturally skilled” due to gendered, ethnicized, and age‐related attributes and as “trained and experienced” through internal courses. This article explores the multiple meanings of training by examining its role from the perspective of both agencies and live‐in care workers, based on narrative interviews and fieldwork in Poland and Germany and by adopting an intersectional lens. The article argues that although training has the potential to improve working conditions and care quality, it remains limited by structural inequalities and a lack of regulation. Without broader legal reforms, there is a risk that training will continue to serve more as a marketing strategy for agencies than as a tool for the genuine, fair, and sustainable formalization of the live‐in care sector.
High‐income countries are using migrant care workers to address deficiencies in domestic care, thereby creating new care gaps in their countries of origin. Apart from this, care workers often face challenging working conditions in many countries. This article examines the job profile, needs, and training preferences of migrant live‐in care workers in Austria to inform improvements to their working and living conditions. As part of a transdisciplinary project, an online survey was co‐designed with live‐in care workers and CSOs working with care workers. The survey covered four languages (Slovak, Romanian, Bulgarian, and German). Themes included job profile, training requirements, problems encountered, well‐being, health, work breaks, and social contact in Austria. Descriptive analysis was applied using key figures, including mean values and frequency distributions. The results were interpreted by the project team. Two hundred and twenty‐five live‐in care workers completed the survey. The study found that live‐in carers perform numerous additional tasks, some of which make them feel uncomfortable. Some live‐in carers reported experiencing sexual harassment and physical violence, as well as a deterioration in their physical and mental health, since starting work as a live‐in carer. Participants expressed substantial interest in training opportunities, particularly those dealing with difficult situations in the household. There is great potential to improve conditions for live‐in care workers in Austria by providing services in their native languages. This would benefit both live‐in care workers and care recipients and their families. The expectations regarding what live‐in carers are and are not allowed to do should be communicated much more clearly to clients and their families. Furthermore, dependency on brokering agencies could be reduced by introducing a public health official responsible for administering live‐in arrangements as part of official home care in Austria.
Population ageing is a common trend across Europe, yet its social consequences vary significantly between countries. In Romania, older adults face heightened risks of social exclusion and vulnerability, shaped by the legacy of post‐communist welfare transformations and large‐scale emigration. The shift from a state‐socialist model of social protection to a fragmented, residual system has led to a growing reliance on families and informal networks. At the same time, outmigration of the care workforce abroad has generated a domestic care drain. As a result, access to care in later life is characterised by significant inequalities, which depend on family resources, material conditions, and geographic location. Drawing on a 2025 national survey of over 900 persons aged 65 and older, this study examines the relationship between the care needs of older people and the support they receive, with the aim of identifying the most vulnerable groups. Anchored in the care poverty framework, the analysis considers individual characteristics (age, gender, health status, socioeconomic position), family context (living arrangements, presence of migrant children), and structural dimensions (urban‐rural divides). Findings reveal that older adults living in rural areas, those residing alone, individuals with migrant close family members, weak social networks, material deprivation, or poor health are more likely to experience care poverty. These results highlight the uneven distribution of care resources and point to the urgent need for targeted policy interventions to mitigate inequalities in later‐life care provision.
This article examines care‐labour mobility between Slovenia and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) within the state‐organised system of residential care for older people, situating it on Europe’s semi‐periphery. Addressing gaps in European research, largely focused on private households and East–West intra‐EU mobility, it shifts attention to welfare states as employers embedded in asymmetric geopolitical relations. Drawing on interviews with migrant care workers and institutional actors in Slovenia and BiH, the analysis conceptualises this mobility through the lens of care extractivism, understood as the structured over‐extraction of labour, time, and skills through the interaction of migration regimes, labour market segmentation, and welfare arrangements. The article shows how the interplay between Slovenia’s care deficits and BiH’s position within postwar state formation and uneven European integration, both shaped by broader political and economic transformations over the past three decades, produces a relational field of labour mobility rooted in the shared post‐Yugoslav space. It identifies key mechanisms of extraction, including employer‐tied migration regimes, family‐based recruitment, dequalification and skill extraction, temporal over‐availability, and the externalisation of social reproduction onto migrant networks. The article contributes to existing scholarship by demonstrating how welfare states actively organise transnational care extraction and by advancing care extractivism as a conceptual framework for analysing hierarchical relations across multiple Europes.
Across Europe, migrant live‐in care workers from Central and Eastern Europe play an increasingly important role in long‐term care systems. These arrangements are often associated with precarious working conditions, including long hours, low pay, and blurred boundaries between work and private life. The Netherlands is sometimes considered an exception, as generous cash‐for‐care subsidies combined with relatively strict regulation suggest that live‐in care workers should be protected from such conditions. Yet reports of exploitation continue to emerge. This article examines how precarious working conditions persist despite extensive regulation. Drawing on a qualitative study of Slovak migrant live‐in care workers and intermediaries operating between Slovakia and the Netherlands, the analysis explores how care arrangements are organised and governed in practice. The findings show that formal compliance with labour regulations often coexists with expectations of near‐constant availability. Intermediaries play a central role in structuring these arrangements, shaping recruitment, contracts, and mobility between households and workers. Using a framework that examines the interaction between funding, regulation, information, and enforcement in welfare markets, the article demonstrates how generous public funding and strong regulation can still produce regulatory blind spots. By focusing on the everyday experiences of migrant workers and the role of intermediaries, the study contributes to debates on the governance of migrant care labour and the regulation of household‐based care markets.
