* Apologies for Cross-posting *
Call for Papers:
Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting, New York, 24-
28 February 2012
Session: Taking Control? New Geographies of Self-Care and Personalization
Convenors: Andrew Power (University of Southampton), Rob Wilton (McMaster University) and Mark Skinner (Trent University).
In recent years, there has been a significant increase in policies and programs within health and social care designed to offer people more choice and autonomy in the delivery of their own care and support. This trend, referred to variously as ‘self-determination’, ‘self-managed care’ or ‘personalization’, has evolved in particular ways in different places and for different groups including people with disabilities, mental health consumers and older persons.
These policies and programs have enabled people to participate more in their own support – through person-centered planning, individualized funding and more flexible service delivery. However, they have also downloaded more accountability and responsibility onto individual recipients of support, with additional implications for family caregivers, paid support workers, and voluntary sector organizations.
The trend toward self-determination also has many geographical implications in the way care/ support is organized, particularly the ways in which the individualized agenda has indirectly begun to re-sculpt more conventional forms of group or communal care – such as day care centers, group homes and so on. It has also re-shaped the service landscape, carving out new roles for the voluntary sector, the public service sector, and the welfare entitlements of the state.
In this session we are interested in conceptual and empirical research that explores the profound social and spatial impacts of this restructuring.
Potential topics for papers may include, but are not limited to, the following:
• The geographically uneven impacts of this policy change;
• Specific impacts upon the wellbeing, citizenship and everyday geographies of different stakeholders (individuals, families, support workers, etc);
• Representations of welfare and health care and the new morality of personalization (the norms, values, and expectations of self care);
• Relationship to neoliberalism and broader political economic changes;
• Policy mobility, rhetoric and practice of the welfare state and health care policy;
• Implications for comparative health and social care studies;
• Alternative visions and practices of care/support, and resistance to the new welfare geographies;
• Methodologies that might be best suited to grasping the critical changes to the personalization agenda at different scales.
Keywords: Care, support, welfare, disability, voluntary, personalization, independent living.
Format: A paper based session consisting of 15 minute papers to leave time for discussion.
Please submit an abstract of c200-250 words together with the title of their proposed paper and the names and affiliation of authors not later than September 14th to:
Andrew ([log in to unmask]), Rob Wilton ([log in to unmask]) and Mark Skinner ([log in to unmask]).
