| Summary/Abstract |
This essay aims to understand how the complex configurations of welfare shape and change the identity of carers, and the conditions and relations in the policy and practice of social care. It is based on the analysis of interviews with mothers of children with disabilities, collected in 2006 and 2008 in Russia, as well as analysis of more recent material in the public sphere (blogs and electronic mass media). In the interviews and blogs, women tell their stories about their experience of social exclusion and choice. The analysis shows how welfare institutions and discourses work to secure the well-being of citizens, to construct social inequality, to define the ways people think about normality and shape their identities and lives.
|