Keynote lecture: Unsettling the Familiarity of Care in the Community
by Dr Rosie Read, (Bournemouth University)
Thursday 8 October 2026, 2 – 3:30pm
Seminar Room 00.079, Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities
The keynote will be open to the public but registration is required. Please register via Eventbrite.
Please note that this talk is the keynote speech for the Community Health Workshop at the Medical Humanities Research Hub
This talk explores perennial UK policy imperatives to shift health and social care to ‘the community’. The goal of enabling people with long term health conditions, chronic illness, physical impairment and frailty to receive care and support they need in their homes and neighbourhoods, rather than in hospital or residential care, has been reiterated by successive governments since at least the 1960s. This talk focuses on the assumptions and contradictions that tend to become embedded in this objective. I examine how different forms of waged and unwaged caregiving labour that are necessary to the achievement of the desired shift to community are also devalued, depoliticized and taken for granted.
Dr Rosie Read is a Principal Lecturer in Social Sciences in the Faculty of Business and Law at Bournemouth University, UK. She is a social anthropologist with research interests in waged and unwaged caring work, social care, volunteering, gender, class, community development, and welfare state transformation.
Medical Humanities Research Hub, TORCH Research Hubs
