Envisioning Transformative Resilience through the Ethics of Care: Care Collectives Among Precarious Families Living in Informal Subdivided Homes

Over the past two decades, while global inequalities between countries have declined, there has been a sharp rise in within-country inequalities. This often manifests in the growing precariousness of employment and housing faced by disadvantaged groups across both developed and developing societies. In response, policymakers have emphasized resilience building as a key institutional intervention to enable individuals—especially families—to adapt positively to adversities. However, the resilience framework has been criticized for its conservative tendency to retain existing systems and the status quo, rather than creating more equitable socio-political structures and relations. Building upon this criticism, this study draws on the theory of the ethics of care to rethink the concept of resilience in the context of vulnerable families. The study focuses on Hong Kong, an example of developmental welfare capitalism, and investigates precarious families living in informal subdivided homes—tiny and substandard dwellings subdivided from larger domestic quarters—to examine the complex interactions between families, communities, and social policies in the process of resilience building. Data was collected through ethnographic observation since January 2021 and in-depth interviews with 53 families living in subdivided units and community workers supporting these families. The findings illustrate various strategies employed by tenants at both individual and familial levels to cope with everyday precarity, including devising spatio-material arrangements within their homes, mobilizing familial and community resources, and utilizing cross-border spatio-temporal mobility. The study demonstrates that resilience is a relational process created collectively on multiple levels and is intimately structured by the policy regime and its underlying political-economic configurations. It argues that an individualistic framing of resilience may reinforce the neoliberal social policy script, which defines the family as a self-responsible socio-economic unit. In contrast, understanding resilience as collectives working towards maximizing care capacities can foster transformative politics for institutional changes, particularly in the post-pandemic era.