Care, Inequalities, and Conviviality : The Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Berlin, Buenos Aires and Mexico City

Care, long overlooked by mainstream political and academic actors, seemed to have become one of the most urgent issues of our time amid the COVID-19 pandemic. While recognizing that the crisis of care is far from a new phenomenon, we use the pandemic as a magnifying glass to analyse its impact on both social inequalities and patterns of living together, i.e., conviviality. Our empirical analysis focuses on the cases of Argentina, Mexico, and Germany, based on original surveys conducted in the largest city of each country: Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Berlin. We provide an analytical framework that assesses the impact of the pandemic by comparing diverse social groups and societies in which care is organized differently. The analysis shows that different models of care provision translated into heterogeneous levels of support for the population during the crisis, and that unequal access to care services determined, to a large extent, the unequal impact of the pandemic and its containment measures on specific social groups.