The Millennial Caregiver as the "Canary in the Coal Mine": The Politics of Injury, Slow Violence and Field 'Care'

Abstract

There are more than 40 million unpaid caregivers in the U.S. and growing, and 1 in 4 of them are millennials. This thesis is uniquely positioned to examine the rapid rise of young adult caregivers known as "millennial caregivers” (between the ages of 18 to 39) who are increasingly shouldering the burden of a global “caregiver crisis”. I examine the representational dilemmas obscuring millennial caregiving and posit the notion of Field ‘Care’ as a working schematic to articulate 1) n. the messy ecological patchwork of media-related “care” imaging, symbols and messages that inundate young caregivers and is 2) v. a call to action, a reorientation of millennial caregiving needs through the lens of “slow violence” to underline the distinctive forms of harm and crisis management that millennial caregivers adopt. I draw from conversations and interviews with millennial caregivers, employ mixed methods research, and participant observation in virtual media platforms to articulate millennial caregivers’ negotiations of identity-/-mean-making processes.