Reconciling Work, Care and Justice: informal care, status inclusion and self-empowering dynamics

The phenomenological analysis presented in this chapter sheds light onto the less visible and often unexplored aspects of care. One of these aspects concerns the energising and empowering effects of care responsibilities that clearly help people not only to overcome the exhaustion connected with multi-task operations but also to balance their perceived status exclusion from other settings. Indeed, the crucial role of care in terms of status inclusion represents one of the unexpected and certainly still uncharted aspects of care. Such broader phenomenological analysis brings to the surface important and understudied elements, perhaps a blend of new and old elements, which acquire a completely new sense in light of the Interaction Ritual model (Collins, 2004) and with the inclusion of gay/lesbian and single carers