Learning to care: the moral development of paid care work in Singapore Field: Anthropology

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Despite its centrality to life, little is known of how we become carers and how to enable caring people. Existing literature on the anthropology of care and ethics of care tends to examine the ethical-moral, political-economic, and embodied dimensions of care separately. Furthermore, existing approaches often treat care as an emotional-cognitive capacity that people are intrinsically able to exercise, overlooking the ways in which care is learnt. These theoretical shortcomings prevent us from understanding how to enable care holistically and foster caring societies. If we are to address the evident deficit of care for the aged, an integrative approach that foregrounds the moral development of care is needed. I aim to address this by examining how care workers in Singapore learn to care for the aged - how they develop the moral skills of caring in bodily and cognitive ways, and how this process might be shaped by aged care economies, material environments, local moral worldviews, and dominant care ideologies. By focusing on paid care work rather than voluntary care, I foreground the moral ambiguities associated with being paid to care. Moreover, by focusing on Singapore's multi-ethnic context, where a significant portion of care work is performed by migrant workers from lower-to-middleincome Asian countries, I hope to trace the dilemmas that emerge when multiple moralities regarding how to care, intersect. To achieve this, I aim to ask: 1) what are the moral struggles care workers face in caring for older people? 2) how do they learn to navigate the everyday moral challenges of care work in embodied ways? 3) how do socio-cultural entanglements, material environments and care economies shape their experiences? I aim to examine these questions by working part-time as a care worker and observing fellow care workers across multiple aged care settings in Singapore - in a nursing home, family homes, and assisted living facilities. Through the direct experience of learning to care, I hope not only to examine the haptic, non-linguistic and non-visual elements of embodied care development but more critically, to foster solidarity and trust with fellow care workers that can aid in a more intimate ethnography of learning to care. I also aim to co-design a pedagogy of care with care workers and local migrant worker activist organisations that will provide concrete recommendations for how care organisations and policymakers can support care workers in their development and practice of care.