Female migration to Spain and the "global care chains" have functioned both as a "solution" to the care crisis and as a survival strategy for many migrant women amid recurring economic crises. Employment in the domestic sector, however, entails significant costs for physical and mental health due to labor precarity, lack of rights, and the emotional burden of caring for older adults. This article explores the health impacts on migrant women domestic workers across their migratory and occupational trajectories, using a longitudinal, gender-focused perspective. Findings from a long-term ethnographic study inform public policy development aimed at preventing occupational risks and enhancing the well-being of domestic workers.
This article examines community care practices within the popular economy and explores the ongoing dynamics and transformations in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Using a qualitative approach, it focuses on the case of the Union of Workers of the Popular Economy (UTEP). The analysis reveals how activities aimed at ensuring food security and addressing multiple needs in low-income neighborhoods have grown increasingly complex with the consolidation of the union's sociocommunity work sector. Through this process of politicization, the workers engaged in these tasks have come to recognize and conceptualize them as forms of community care work. The political and institutional shifts associated with economic adjustment measures and the criminalization of popular organizing, initiated in 2023, posed significant challenges to these practices. In response, workers have developed new forms of protest and reorganized community care spaces to continue sustaining life.
This article explores the subjectivities that have been taking shape as a result of the platformization of domestic and care work in Spain, a sector historically feminized, migrant, and racialized. Drawing on a qualitative analysis based on semi-structured interviews with workers in the sector, it examines discourses surrounding the subjectivities and identities constructed around digital platforms. From a critical perspective, the article addresses the contradiction between the corporate discourse of professionalization and the reality of deregulated labour, focusing on how workers, despite facing adverse and precarious working conditions, evaluate positively aspects such as flexibility, presenting their work experiences under these platforms as an opportunity. Finally, the article problematizes the role of these platforms as one of the few pathways into the labour market for workers in vulnerable situations and with limited opportunities to access stable and secure employment, shaped by factors such as migration, the lack of support networks, and the invisibilization of care work within neoliberalism.
The Spatial Justice Index (IJE) has been designed as an assessment and monitoring tool for conditions in neighborhoods of the border cities in southern Mexico. This index is based on spatial justice theory, which frames justice as equity and equality of resources and also understands it as a social construct. Using a mixed-methods approach, IJE measurements were carried out within the framework of the research and advocacy project in order to evaluate the impact of activities conducted in two neighborhoods in Tapachula, Chiapas, and two in Tenosique, Tabasco, where people on the move and local residents live. The aim of this paper is to reflect on the conditions of spatial justice and the reach of intervention activities for the construction of a just space, through analysis of the IJE results in those neighborhoods and their transformations over the course of the project.
This dossier aims to explore the various transformations that care work is undergoing within urban spaces. Rooted in the socioreproductive crisis facing contemporary capitalist societies, we approach several ongoing dynamics and mutations located in large cities and metropolitan areas of Southern Europe and South America, with a particular focus on Spain, Argentina, and Uruguay. A reading of these transformations is proposed based on three dimensions or circuits: capital, the public sector, and the socio-community sphere. Thus, the dossier establishes a dialogue between contributions from different research projects to map the urban landscape of the main changes and challenges currently affecting care work. It is within the interaction between the circuits of capital, the State, and communities where the reorganization of social reproduction is being contested.
