The aim of this second conference is to give continuity to the first international conference held in Tarragona in 2019 under the title Caring for elderly and dependent people: Promoting gender equality and social justice, which focused on discussing different models of care for dependent people, in a context of increasing longevity and growing care needs, and the challenges posed for the 21st century.  

The impact of the COVID-19 crisis underscored the need to develop alternatives to the current long-term care model, which is inadequate to meet existing needs, unsatisfactory because it leads to unwanted institutionalisation, and unjust because it is structured around inequalities based on gender, class and national origin. The second conference focuses on precisely these issues and seeks to explore the questions that need to be reformulated in the current system in order to achieve the recognition and social redistribution of care. The reorientation of current public policy towards the deinstitutionalisation of care will entail strengthening local and community care resources to ensure dignified care based on human rights while respecting people's desire to grow old at home and in their own surroundings. At the same time, it also presents a risk of a return to reliance on the family for care if insufficient resources are available. 

The family model of care, based on women's unpaid work, with little involvement of public services and the increasing commercialisation and casualisation of care work, has been shown to give rise to serious difficulties in sustaining life, while exacerbating social inequalities in access to care resources. We aim to discuss how the boundaries between genders and generations, as well as the boundaries between the public, the private and the communal, have been reshaped by the pandemic. The question we need to ask ourselves is whether these changes are structural or cyclical, and whether they allow us to consider new forms of social organisation of care.  

We invite you to reflect on these topics and contribute to exploring the diversity of contexts and situations in which long-term care takes place, as well as the impact of the pandemic on forms of care. The specific aim is to consider the role of the family and women in the social organisation of care, as well as private and commercial forms of care in the home and in institutions (mainly rooted in domestic employment and in the proliferation of care service companies), and possible ways to strengthen community care within the framework of the role of public policies to create new care alternatives linked to local communities that can serve to reverse inequalities based on gender, class and national origin.