ABSTRACT

This chapter is about family members and friends who provide care and the spaces and places they occupy as a result. These so-called caringscapes (McKie, Bowlby and Gregory, 2001) are produced by the complex interplay of practices, relationships, performances and politics of care that unfold between people who provide or receive care (often interchangeably). Since the early 1990s, Christine Milligan, Allison Williams, Mark Skinner, Valorie Crooks, Andrew Power, Melissa Giesbrecht, Tamara Daley and other geographers have contributed to our understanding of this constituency. Since this time, the question of who cares? has been posed many times (Barnett, 2005; Milligan and Power, 2009). Those who provide significant levels of care are known sometimes collectively as informal caregivers/carers, although they are quite often ambiguously defined, relative to other groups. Usually women, caregivers within the family occupy distinct roles, depending on their relationship within the family structure and the caregiving roles that are needed/expected: from dutiful daughter looking after an aging parent, to a self-identified expert by experience, supporting an adult with complex and multiple impairments.