This book sets out to give an account of home and care, gender and housing, at a time of ‘crisis’. We understand ‘crisis’ in this context as multifaceted and various (see Walby 2015), encompassing austerity cuts to welfare services, the resulting loss of community and public infrastructure, worsening inequality, loss of benefits and income and the wider loss of social infrastructure which comes with a neoliberal settlement (Pearson and Elson 2015). Is labelling such conditions ‘crises’ helpful? Within everyday discussions we tend to think of political and economic crises as dramatic and visible, and as taking place in the public sphere, while we might consider personal crises to be individual and subjective, and associated with trauma and poor mental health. Yet this book focuses on crises which play out in the interstices of public policy, economics and politics on the one hand, and in personal life, relationships and senses of self on the other (see Pain 2010). This requires thinking across the boundaries between public and private lives, long critiqued by feminist scholars (see Davidoff and Hall 1987), as well as considering what kinds of experiences and subjectivities are visible or invisible within political and economic debates.

This book is concerned with questions of home and care, the scenes of many of our most intimate and everyday experiences. A crisis in this terrain might involve realising that paid work shifts do not match childcare; or experiencing the closure of a Children's Centre that gave a rhythm to a long day of caring for a baby; or losing a benefit which enabled a relative to access respite care. As these examples show, such crises are, to borrow a phrase from a Chapter Four, ‘knotted within’ everyday practices, relationships and subjectivities. In experiencing or witnessing them, either as an individual or as a researcher, it may be hard, first, to make them ‘visible’ at all, and second, to connect them to wider political and economic changes. It is one of the purposes of this book to provide conceptual, empirical and methodological resources to render visible the political and economic stakes of matters of home and care at the current time.

In the rest of this introductory chapter, we first sketch out some of the key concepts which form the backdrop to subsequent chapters, namely questions of austerity and neoliberalism, and of home and care.