Entangled care: work, family, and community in the margins of urban Brazil [Presentation]

Care is foundational to the functioning of our workplaces, families, and societies, yet it remains chronically undervalued and unevenly supported (Tronto, 2013; Fraser, 2016). The 2026 WFRN Conference theme, “Centering Care Across the Life Course,” invites us to place care at the core of work and family conversations. This paper responds to that call from a Global South perspective, exploring how care is lived and sustained under conditions of inequality.

The study draws on ongoing qualitative fieldwork with low-income mothers in the favelas of Pavão-Pavãozinho and Cantagalo, Rio de Janeiro - women who balance informal work and unpaid care in the absence of reliable state support. Despite Brazil’s new Política Nacional de Cuidados (National Care Policy), daily life continues to rely on informal networks of reciprocity. These networks form invisible infrastructures of care: collective arrangements that enable life to continue despite structural neglect.

Working in partnership with the NGO Solar Meninos de Luz, the project uses feminist and decolonial methodologies - including photovoice, testimonio, and walking interviews - to co-produce knowledge with participants. These methods make visible the spatial, emotional, and intergenerational dimensions of care, as women document their own lives and the everyday practices through which they sustain family and community.

By focusing on the lived experience of women who are often absent from work–family research, the paper challenges the Euro-American assumptions that underpin dominant notions of “work–life balance.” Instead, it approaches care as work–family entanglement - the inseparable and dynamic interweaving of paid and unpaid labour, kinship, and emotion that sustains everyday life under inequality (Jaga et al., 2024). This perspective resists the idea that work and family are distinct or competing spheres, framing them instead as mutually constitutive practices shaped by social, spatial, and historical conditions.

Through this lens, centering care across the life course requires more than policy reform. It calls for an epistemic shift: recognising the knowledge and creativity embedded in the care practices of those at the margins. From the favelas of Rio emerge not only stories of endurance, but vital lessons in reciprocity, solidarity, and interdependence - insights that can transform how we understand the work of care in both the Global South and beyond.