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Materialities of mundane care and the art of holding one's own

Julie Brownlie and Helen Spandler

Seeking and accepting help in everyday life is shaped by two key paradoxes. Firstly, this type of help is both mundane and highly significant: ordinary practices and interactions create and maintain connections between people (Fine and Glendinning 2005), which, in turn, render life liveable. Secondly, despite being an 'everyday' occurrence, the giving and receiving of low-level support is subject to 'complex negotiations' (Breheny and Stephens 2009: 1309). In other words, the 'decision-making ecology' (Lindley et al. 2012) of informal support, embedded as it is within an affective and moral economy shaped by familial, local and societal expectation, does not just happen. To this extent, acts of mundane care - very ordinary acts and interactions of help and support - can be understood as achievements (Anderson et al. 2015a) and are all the more remarkable for rarely being explicitly reflected upon or articulated (Allen et al. 2015).

Balancing the need for help with retaining one's own dignity (Breheny and Stephens 2009) is something we all have to manage, but is especially difficult in the context of illness and in a sociopolitical climate that increasingly valorises independence and demonises dependence. Frank (2010) refers to this balancing act as the art of 'holding one's own' and has written extensively about how we often cultivate stories about ourselves to help practise this art, specifically in response to threats to self, such as ill health. This chapter explores how people are able to hold their own thorough materialities of care, including the stories they tell about them. There is a well-established body of sociological literature on place-based practices of care, neighbouring and community support (see, for example, Phillipson et al. 2001), including recent work exploring how people who live with chronic illness or disability position themselves as active agents (Sakellariou 2015), thus effectively holding their own. The role of mundane materialities in these practices, however, is underexplored.

This edited collection concerns how mundane materialities actively mediate health and care practices. Our aim is to extend the notion of mundanity to care itself; and then to argue that materialities are core, not just to how mundane help is mediated, but to how it happens at all and to how we hold our own. The range of skills and resources linked to everyday help and support - the ability to drive, to offer childcare, to provide a meal and so on - are clearly material to the extent that they are about places, buildings and objects. But materialities are not just what passes between people - or what people pass through - they are part of how relationships are constituted (Anderson et al. 2015a). New materialism, in committing to a post-anthropocentric approach (Braidotti 2013), asks that we pay attention to human and non-human assemblages and the multiple relations within them, which include objects, people, relationships, emotions, resources and buildings as well as economic or legal processes, and cultural practices and expectations such as reciprocity. All these elements, new materialists suggest, have material effects.

The relations around any practice - in our case, mundane help - need to be understood through their interplay. Relations are extensive and, thus, we have been selective. For instance, while economic relations are at work in the assemblage of informal care, this aspect has not been included here. Our aim is to use empirical data to explore how the assemblage that is mundane care happens when the care is indirect and informal. By doing so, we argue that the materialities involved in this type of care - what one of our participants describes as caring 'by the by,' or what we have previously referred to as caring 'around the edges' (Anderson et al. 2015a) - are fundamental to how care comes about.

Drawing on our recent research on low-level care in two different parts of the UK, we here direct our concern with materialities beyond traditional medical and health settings (Martin et al. 2015, van Hout et al. 2015) to everyday contexts. Our focus is on the mundane help that takes place in the context of ill health between people who are not immediate family, such as neighbours, acquaintances and others with whom we interact, regularly or fleetingly, in our daily lives. The following section briefly revisits the literature that informs our analysis.

Mundane material

The new materialist turn in the social science and the humanities (Brown 2004, Chapman 2006, Fox 2016) has focused on extending analyses to 'involve non-human agents, materials and technologies' (Martin et al. 2015: 1016). New materialists claim that agency - the actions that produce the social world - extends beyond human actors to the non-human and inanimate (DeLanda 2006, Latour 2005); that everyday materialities are not only a repository of meanings but are 'generative of actions and reactions' (Martin et al. 2015: 1011), including those relating to care.

This emphasis on the generative character of everyday materialities distinguishes the materialities of care literature from earlier research about how spaces and places enable wellbeing and care, including the 'landscapes of care' (Milligan and Wiles 2010: 736) and therapeutic landscapes literature (Cattell et al. 2008, Martin et al. 2015, Williams 1998). Materialities of care research has also foregrounded the relational aspects of materialities, including the interdependency between the human and the non-human realm. In studying our interaction with objects, Chapman (2006) argues that we need to explore the ways in which such interactions are influenced by the wider social context, as well as by other materialities such as place and architecture (Martin et al. 2015); for example, noting that the layout of places and buildings has a 'deep structure' that has the potential to 'bring people together or segregate them' (Martin et al. 2015: 1017).

It is, however, hard to disentangle materialities from the stories we tell about them. While this narrative dimension is not the primary focus of this chapter, it is consistent with the argument that stories are 'sociocultural constructs' (Fox 2016: 67) that also have material effects. Through the notion of holding one's own, we aim to show how mundane care is produced through shared materialities. We begin with an outline of the two studies and describe our method of reading across the two data sets.

Researching mundane materialities

We draw on two separate but related research projects: the 'Liveable Lives' study (led by Julie Brownlie), carried out in and around Glasgow (Anderson et al. 2015a, 2015b), and the 'Landscapes of Helping' study (led by Helen Spandler), which focused on Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire (Allen et al. 2015). Both studies were commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation to explore low intensity informal support and were commissioned as part of a programme called 'Risk, Relationships and Trust in an Ageing Society'. The studies ran concurrently between 2013 and 2015 and both adopted a primarily qualitative multi-method approach. Ethical approval for the studies was granted by the University of Stirling and the University of Central Lancashire, respectively.

The Glasgow study applied ethnographic methods in three socioeconomically diverse areas in and around Glasgow - Hillhead, Maryhill and Bearsden - including walking interviews, focus groups and observations of community spaces and organisations. In-depth interviews (n = 44) were also carried out over two meetings with participants, and keeping a log in the intervening period of instances of help and support given and received, offered or accepted, withheld or declined. A smaller number of interviews (n = 15) was conducted with family members, friends or acquaintances of the core research participants. The participants were recruited by household screening and networking to maximise diversity (for the research report, see Anderson et al. 2015a, 2015b).1

The Hebden study initially involved a 'rapid capture' street survey (n = 151) to identify a range of factors shaping everyday care (see Spandler et al. 2014a). Three diverse study sites were then selected and, through observations, the contextual factors that supported helping practices were identified; less visible practices of helping were accessed and individuals were recruited for interview. In-depth semi-structured interviews (n = 40) were carried out with a range of participants, including those living in the town: 'hill dwellers', long-term residents and new arrivals (for research reports see Allen et al. 2015, Spandler et al. 2014a).2

For this chapter, we jointly re-analysed our combined data. As our original research did not specifically focus on ill health, we began by sampling both...