Reconsidering Mobility of Care: Learning From the Experiences of Low-Income Women During the COVID-19 Lockdown in Itagüí, Colombia

Abstract

In recent years the literature on mobility of care has rapidly expanded, and the concept offers a powerful lens to highlight how everyday mobilities are organised, undertaken, and experienced in gendered ways. The concept can nonetheless benefit from further theoretical development. In this paper we enrich the mobility of care concept by drawing on influential conceptualisations of care from the feminist literature and informed by the analysis of data collected during the COVID-19 lockdown of a group of 40 low-income women living in peri-urban areas of Itagüí, a municipality in the south of the Medellín metropolitan area, Colombia. Through this approach we first argue that relying on a taxonomy of trip purposes has limited the way we understand the role of care in urban mobilities and risks underestimating the prevalence of mobility of care. Second, we suggest that activities of self-care can also generate mobility of care and that their consideration allows practices and experiences of receiving care to be considered in studies of mobility of care. Finally, we show how care activities are part of, and generate, intertwined mobilities and immobilities, and argue that further reflection on their relationships is needed if the full extent of mobility of care is to be rendered visible.

Keywords: mobility of care, mixed methods, Global South, transport studies, Coronavirus