CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Prsa, Anita |
|---|---|
| Title | Caring Like a Family: Value, Spirituality, and the Professionalisation of Palliative Care Volunteering in Austria and Croatia |
| Summary | Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation examines how volunteer care work for terminally ill and dying individuals is mobilised, enacted, and conceptualised in Austria and Croatia. It argues that palliative care volunteering plays a crucial role in shaping familial responsibilities in caring for frail family members, thereby influencing the familialistic welfare models characteristic of both countries. In addition to engaging with welfare state literature and its feminist variants, the research draws on and contributes to scholarship on volunteer work, as well as the anthropology and sociology of work and religion. The comparative study is grounded in interdisciplinary qualitative research conducted with the two largest palliative care organisations in Vienna and Zagreb. Through interviews, participant observation, and discourse analysis, the dissertation explores how volunteer labour practices reflect and reshape broader cultural and welfare trends. Austria and Croatia – the countries with different economic development and third sector capacity, yet shared familialistic norms and Catholic traditions – provide fertile ground for such a comparative inquiry. While volunteer care work has been previously analysed in the context of welfare state arrangements and its distinctions from other forms of care, palliative care volunteering has not yet been explored as a force actively shaping conceptions of family. Volunteers are often omitted from discussions on familialism and family-oriented care policies, despite being integral to sustaining the idea of the family as the primary care provider in both contexts. This dissertation argues that the meaning and practice of family care both converge and diverge in Austria and Croatia. Each country is characterised by its distinct volunteer arrangements – Austria’s conservative-corporatist model and Croatia’s post-socialist welfare regime – as well as by the differing roles religion plays in these (nominally) Catholic societies. The analysis reveals two distinct familialistic welfare paths: orderly corporatist (Austria) and custodially disorganised (Croatia). In the former, institutions quietly embed and operationalise norms of care through their policies; in the latter, they promote these norms more explicitly but fail to provide adequate support. At the heart of this dynamic in both cases lies the notion of volunteer professionality, which I refer to as para-professionality – an ethos shaped by the cultivation of specific emotional dispositions, such as love and empathy, and grounded in a particular vision of humanity. This study analyses these affective investments within the broader framework of capitalist valorisation of social reproduction and the spiritual currents informed by locally grounded expressions of Catholicism. In comparing palliative care volunteering in these two socio-economically divergent capitals of two Central European countries, the dissertation makes several scholarly contributions. It develops new typologies of familialistic welfare regimes and offers a more nuanced understanding of how volunteerism intersects with family care within evolving welfare state structures. Moreover, by analysing the practice and conceptualisation of volunteer work in two Catholic contexts, this dissertation brings much-needed nuance to understandings of religion's role in welfare arrangements. It moves beyond reductive modernisation or secularisation narratives to show how religious frameworks shape the meanings and boundaries of labour, value, and social reproduction in contemporary capitalist societies. |
| Supervisor | Zimmermann, Susan Carin; Palmberger, Monika |
| Department | Gender Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/prsa_anita.pdf |
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