This doctoral research, based in the district of Lisbon, Portugal, examines how paid and unpaid forms of home care in old age reproduce, negotiate, or challenge the meanings and boundaries that structure distinctions between family, professional, institutional and informal care arrangements. Framing this research within the context of the so-called ‘care crisis’ and ageing in place policies in the European context, I investigate tensions and ambivalences between public and private, formal and informal, work and non-work, taking into account the specific context of changing family and labour relations in care work in Portugal, characterised by informality, the increasing role of immigrant workers, and the valorisation of the ‘informal carer’ role associated with the reproduction of the idea of care as a family and gendered responsibility.

My current theoretical framework emphasises the connection between care, old age, and home, aiming to question how the ‘home’ develops as both as a place of well-being in ageing and as a workplace characterised by increasing inequalities and the devaluation of old age.

Through a multi-sited ethnography in the Lisbon district (2024–2025), involving private companies, social institutions, formal and informal paid care workers, as well as informal and organised groups of care workers, the project focuses on two main dimensions: 1) the moral logics and value systems shaping how care work is organised, regulated, and managed; and 2) how people involved in home care experience, (re)signify, or negotiate care as practice, relationship, and ethics. The theoretical proposal is based on an integrated, multi-scalar, and ‘in relation’ approach, which particularly draws on the perspectives of feminist political economy and the anthropology of care.