The Conversation<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n\u201cMy project was really focused on questions of what it means to withdraw from care \u2014 asking people about reaching their limits, about decisions they made to walk off the job or renegotiate care and family responsibilities, and that question of \u2018When can you say no?\u2019\u201d Klostermann says.<\/p>\n
Over the next two years, she will turn these interests to questions about how care is understood in society because, as she notes, the current conditions of care have been organized and designed in a certain way, which means they can be changed.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow I\u2019m switching gears a bit, working with Andrea Doucet with more of a focus on reimagining care work policies and how we build equitable, sustainable and consensual care relationships,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
The issue of consent is key, especially considering what Klostermann calls \u201cthe dominant moral, gendered, racialized and class assumptions or societal expectations around care\u201d and ongoing efforts to renegotiate those assumptions.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople who need care should have a right to choose what kind of care they receive, and people who provide care should have options and choices without feeling trapped or having someone else\u2019s life depend on them,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Klostermann\u2019s current project about the COVID-19 context grew out of the insights that interviewees shared during her dissertation research, especially when they were questioned about what they might change if they had the power to do so.<\/p>\n
\u201cI like the idea of tapping people\u2019s shoulders as advocates and knowledge-makers, people who have insights or know what is going on,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
She also believes that many of the stories that were shared with her by people who had reached their limits and left care work may be more relatable to a broader population now, in a post-COVID-19 world where the challenging conditions of care work have been exposed.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome care providers were put in situations where they were the only one doing the work, or they were the primary care provider with very limited public supports and limited options to share responsibility,\u201d says Klostermann. \u201cI think more people can relate to this now because of the pandemic \u2014 that sense of being stuck, or a sense of responsibility that some people have been experiencing for years while on long waitlists to get loved ones into nursing homes or with limited access to affordable child care.\u201d<\/p>\n
Klostermann is interested in finding commonalities and looking at how, as she describes it, \u201cpaid and unpaid forms and contexts of care are interconnected and interwoven\u201d as she starts off on this new branch of her research.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat do those mostly women care providers have in common? What are the commonalities between a paid care worker who is clocking in early, working through their breaks, doing additional unpaid work, and family members who are also picking up the slack?\u201d she says. \u201cAre there ways that we could foster solidarity or notice common ground between women in different situations?\u201d<\/p>\n
Klostermann, who is also a playwright and creative artist, is curious about how people might be engaged as storytellers or activists, sharing their takes and insights and funny stories to help rethink care.<\/p>\n
\u201cI use performance art as a way of conducting research, and it has been a site of learning and processing, or even more unpacking of what I came to unpack through those performances,\u201d she says. \u201cI found that in the interviews and conversations with care workers I conducted, they were often very lively when we were just kind of riffing or coming up with new ways of thinking about things together. That\u2019s definitely a huge part now, to really engage people as storytellers or meaning-makers and co-create or work together to value and improve care.\u201d<\/p>\n
She says she is excited to work with Doucet, a leading feminist sociologist of care, and her team, in part because of the creative approaches Doucet takes to engaging with research participants.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt will be cool using interactive visual methods and narrative methods. Andrea has spent the last few decades really developing participatory approaches to work with people,\u201d Klosterman says. \u201cWe\u2019re going to use these kinds of visual methods or digital methods to connect with families and ask what work they do, where they\u2019re being stretched and how they\u2019re dividing up their time between work and care to look at how those conditions or social policies shape their lives.\u201d<\/p>\n
Klostermann also sees hope for change as we move toward a post-COVID-19 world, noting that although we can\u2019t predict the future, there have been some positive conversations around care as the issue has come to the forefront in recent months.<\/p>\n
\u201cOverall, I\u2019m mostly heartened by a lot of the examples in public discourse that look more at care as work, or care as infrastructure, or people saying how essential care is to society or how essential care is to the running of the economy,\u201d she says. \u201cThere have been examples lately like the Make Rivera Public campaign, which is looking at private, for-profit nursing homes that have proved to be the most deadly in the pandemic and really raising questions about how we protect public services or invest in care, and realizing the necessity of public sector supports.\u201d<\/p>\n
Doucet says that she is grateful to have Klostermann join her research team.<\/p>\n
\u201cJanna is a generous team player, a\u00a0unique and brilliant thinker, and a dream to work with,\u201d she says. \u201cAs a transdisciplinary scholar myself, I love working with transdisciplinary\u00a0researchers\u00a0who can carefully navigate between disciplines. We are lucky to have her at Brock.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Caring for others doesn\u2019t have to be burdensome or constraining, so what needs to change to make things more liveable? That is the driving question for Janna Klostermann, who was recently awarded a two-year Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship and joined Brock\u2019s Department of Sociology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":73098,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,1,4,5,38],"tags":[6398,2524,522,10400,10501,128,82],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73097"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73097"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73099,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73097\/revisions\/73099"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}