You are invited to join us for this seminar on 8 June 2015, ....
This talk will offer a perspective based on ongoing research on the emergence and impact of carers’ organisations in Europe, North America, Australia-New Zealand and East Asia and their gradual progress towards the formation of an international carers’ movement.
Carers’ organisations represent people worldwide who care, unpaid, for others to whom they are connected through ties of kinship, friendship or neighbourhood, and who need support in everyday life because of serious illness or disability.
The talk will:
- present an overview of the context, sources of complaint and inspiration, and spurs to action which have motivated and sustained these organisations from their earliest origins in the 1960s until the present day
- highlight some of their activities and achievements
- examine some of the partnerships and coalitions they have formed, at national and international levels, to further their cause.
As an illustrative case, the talk will focus on the emergence of work-care reconciliation as a lobbying and campaigning issues for carers’ organisations around the world.
Professor Sue Yeandle, ARK Ageing Programme Visiting Fellow June 2015.
Professor Yeandle is Director of CIRCLE, the Centre for International Research on Care, Labour and Equalities, at the University of Leeds in the UK, where her work is based in the School of Sociology and Social Policy.
A sociologist who specialises in the study of care, work and family life, Sue led the path-breaking Carers, Employment and Services study, undertaken in partnership with Carers UK in 2006-7. Her subsequent research has included evaluations of two large government programmes of carer support in England and, within a programme of research on telecare and ICT-based support for carers, the AKTIVE project, recently funded by the UK’s Technology Strategy Board and other partners, which explored how technology installed in the home affects the everyday lives of frail older people and those who care for them.
Sue was Special Adviser to the UK’s House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee for its Inquiry on Carers in 2008 and a member of the government’s Task & Finish Group on Carers in Employment, jointly led by Employers for Carers and the Department of Health (England), which reported in summer 2013.
She has published widely on carers and social care policy and on employment and equality issues. Her recent book, edited with Finland’s Professor Teppo Kröger, ‘Combining Paid Work and Family Care: policies and experiences in international perspective’, available from The Policy Press, covers developments in work-care reconciliation in Australia, England, Finland, Sweden, Japan and Taiwan. Sue is currently working on a new book on the influence of the carers’ movement on policy and practice and on its international interconnections.
