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The Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity and Reconciliation Act of 1996, better known as Welfare Reform, implemented, in addition to many other features, a 60-month lifetime limit for welfare receipt. Research to date primarily documents individual-level barriers, characteristics, and outcomes of those who time out. Very little scholarly work considers experiences of mothering or carework after timing out. In this chapter, I ask, what kinds of carework strategies are used by women who have met their lifetime limits to welfare? What do the ways mothers talk about these strategies tell us about the discursive forces they are resisting and/or engaging? Using in-depth interviews at two points in time with women who have timed out of welfare (n = 32 and 23), this analysis shows how mothers’ strategies and the ways they discuss them reveal covert material and symbolic resistance to key discourses – negative assumptions about welfare mothers and a culture of work enforcement – and the conditions shaping their lives (Hollander & Einwohner, 2004). Mothers use carework strategies very similar to those identified in many other studies (e.g., London, Scott, Edin, & Hunter, 2004; Morgen, Acker, & Weigt, 2010; Scott, Edin, London, & Mazelis, 2001), but they provide us with an understanding of carework in a new context. The three groups of strategies explored here – structuring employment and non-employment, protecting children, and securing resources – reveal raced, classed, and gendered labor in which women engage to care for children in circumstances marked by limited employment opportunities and limited state support. The policy implications of mothers’ strategies are also discussed.

This chapter demonstrates the ways in which digital inclusion functions as a super social determinant of health, particularly within the arena of family carework and healthcare for vulnerable disabled US communities. The focus on vulnerable populations, including the elderly, chronically ill, young disabled, neurodivergent, and/or medically complex children and the families that care for them, is a useful case to present a compelling argument for the need to take seriously digital inclusion to maximize health, safety, and well-being for growing populations of Americans today. The authors argue that digital inclusion is an increasingly influential social determinant of health and a key dimension of health equity that offers important benefits and potentials, especially for vulnerable patient populations, for whom in-home and family-centered care are necessary parts of health maintenance, prevention, and well-being. The chapter ends with a discussion of ways that the US government can mitigate digital barriers and facilitate equitable access to broadband internet and e-health resources that address the intersections of digital, health, and care inequalities, with significant impacts in all three dimensions.

This chapter examines the emotional labor of food provisioning for women engaged in local food systems (LFSs), and considers how socio-demographic factors influence the emotional labor of food provisioning for women engaged in LFSs.

Qualitative data was used for analysis, and was gathered through in-depth interviews with 43 women across the state of Ohio who expressed concern with the agrifood system, but engaged in varied levels of LFS participation.

Results confirm that women engaged in LFSs experience heightened emotional labor in food provisioning. Showing care to family, community and the environment, transmitting values, sharing cultural traditions, and demonstrating skill were related to positive emotions that were heightened by LFS engagement. Women with higher incomes, those with partners and children, and those who were not employed were more likely to report these positive emotions associated with food provisioning.

Negative emotions associated with food provisioning were also heightened by LFS engagement. Women reported that LFS engagement heightened their sense of demand, burden, stress, and guilt with food provisioning. Low-income women, employed women, younger women, and women with children were more likely to report negative feelings connected with food provisioning.

This research helps fill a gap in existing literature and encourages agrifood scholars and LFS proponents to acknowledge the fact that women engaged in LFSs are performing significant emotional carework in their food provisioning. This research also confirms that considering intersectionality can be important to understanding the sphere of consumption in agrifood studies.

In the majority of the literature on the social organization of care work, care is often defined in more traditional terms to refer to work on or directly related to the body. In this paper, we would like to venture beyond the body to elaborate upon a particular type of care work – negotiating care – that involves negotiations and sometimes petitions for the purpose of securing care. It is a concept that was salient in a comparative study of the experiences of health care providers with the increasing management of health care in Canada and the United States. For physicians and nurses in both settings we find a sense of the increasing burden of negotiating for care for patients – particularly textually mediated negotiations – as the access to and amount of care is increasingly limited through managed care policies. Moreover, the contexts for these negotiations are continually in flux exacerbating the time devoted to negotiate care. It is in the U.S. context, however, that textual negotiation of care is most extensive and differs in terms of audience – insurers as opposed to providers – and purpose – securing payment and not just care.