Turned Towards: The Politics of Responsibility in Canadian News Media Narratives of Family Care.

Sawchuk, Dana; Klostermann, Janna; Funk, Laura; Cherba, Maria; Giguère, Lauriane; Dunsmore, Rachel Antonia

Awareness of the challenges faced by many late-life family caregivers is imperative in a context in which the state relies on them to compensate for shortcomings in public infrastructure. Reflexive attention is needed, however, to the nature of narratives that mediate understandings of care responsibilities in the public sphere. This article examines framings of family care in Canadian mainstream news media (2010–2021), with a focus on how care-related responsibilities are understood and assigned as part of a "politics of responsibility." Our analysis makes visible multiple and intersecting discourses of family care that assign individual responsibility for care to family carers who are "turned towards" those who rely on their support. Carers are represented as burdened and stressed, as selfless martyrs, and as resources charged with sustaining the economy and health care systems, while support for caregivers is implicitly instrumental and individualistic (rather than rights-based). We also identify some "promising portrayals" in mainstream media that challenge privatization, familialization, and individual responsibility and have the potential to expand dominant social imaginaries of caregiving to imagine or promote mutual, collective, or solidaristic forms of care. Our analysis underscores the urgency of telling more fully contextualized, situated, or politicized stories of care.

MASS media; CAREGIVERS; MEDICAL care; KINSHIP care; OLDER people

Journal of Canadian Studies, 2024, Vol 58, Issue 2, p309

0021-9495

Academic Journal

10.3138/jcs-2023-0028