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micro-spatial and micro-political divisions, with male family members positioned as knowledgeable, rational and calculative, as well as being ultimately in charge of the financial purse strings. This finding also provides an alternative analysis to writing on gender and poverty that finds women take charge of household budgets so as to avoid conflict and manage male feelings of gender crisis (see Fodor 2006). In this sense, my findings help to flesh out the wider picture of everyday social infrastructures of care in times of austerity, which can take many forms. When the underside of the tapestry of relationships in everyday austerity is exposed, a messiness of knots, tangles and threads is revealed.
Fieldwork as Care Work Thirdly, and bringing together multiple threads discussed so far, is the matter of care work and body-work within academic fieldwork. In developing a rapport over months or even years of research, employing ethnographic tools of deep immersion and trust, fieldwork can become an interpersonal and relational space where care (of various kinds and intensities) is given and received. In this way, researchers can become intimate others, knotted within the everyday care infrastructures of participants’ lives, and part of the very phenomenon one might be studying. Such intimacy and care-full relations (see McEwan and Goodman 2010) between researchers and participants might be expressed in numerous ways and through different mediums. The role of body-work that fieldwork involves (if not requires) is one such example, being a conduit for and form of care work. Highly corporeal, embodied and sensual practices of doing care with participants—such as eating with them, listening to them or simply being with them—are often a means of developing connection and intimacy (see Popke 2006; Pottinger 2017). Mirroring Longhurst et al. (2008, p. 208), my fieldwork experiences revealed how ‘the body is a primary tool through which all interactions and emotions filter in accessing research subjects and their geographies’. My field diaries were filled with references to biscuits, cakes and sweet things. Sometimes these were items I had given to participants as a small, absorbable thank-you gesture for taking part, albeit the edible
