Life sustaining responses and everyday care work during the HIV/AIDS and Covid-19 crises in Cape Town, South Africa

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic exposed a profound crisis of social reproduction in South Africa, revealing the fragility of household and community capacities to absorb care responsibilities amidst longstanding inequality and gaps in state social protection. In Cape Town, neighbourhood-based Community Action Networks (CANs) rapidly mobilised to meet urgent material, psychosocial and health-related needs. Drawing on my embedded involvement in this response, this thesis examines the crisis and its community-led responses as revelatory of unmet needs and the limits of the state’s community-based care infrastructure, while also highlighting the prefigurative potential of collectivised, solidaristic forms of care. Despite decades of policy attention to community-based care since the HIV/AIDS crisis and a constitutional commitment to social protection, the pandemic illuminated enduring structural shortcomings. Centring life-sustaining, everyday care work during the Covid-19 crisis and tracing the historical evolution of social policy and community health systems in response to the earlier HIV/AIDS crisis, the thesis advances key claims about the politics, value and the future of community care in South Africa.