Charlotte Hunsicker

Charlotte holds a BA in Political Science as well as a MA in Sociology from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. Before joining the Research Training Group at FAU she worked as a research associate at SHARE (Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe), where she applied qualitative methodology to improvement questionnaire design. Her research interest include gender studies, care (work), and theories of social inequality.

Project: „Warm-hearted compassionate care – tailored to your family’s needs“ – Sentimental Framings in the Provision of Live-In Care

This research project examines the symbolic and emotional framings of paid care work in the context of transnational live-in care arrangements. Focusing on the websites of commercial placement agencies, the project investigates how these actors construct, market, and legitimize care services through sentimental codes, such as “loving support,” “dedication,” or “warm-hearted assistance”, that emotionally charge and morally elevate a highly precarious field of labour.

While research on live-in care has emphasised issues of migration, inequality, and labour precarity, this project addresses the symbolic dimension of how care work is represented and commodified. To do so it employs the concept of sentimentality as a socially structured communicative code that shapes how emotions are expressed, read, and regulated in public discourse.

Using Grounded Theory Methodology, the analysis traces the sentimental narratives, visual strategies, and semantic patterns through which agencies present care as both intimate and professional, familial yet marketable. The project explores how narratives of emotional proximity, moral worth, and idealised family relations are mobilised to stabilise and naturalise market-based care arrangements. It further examines how these sentimental framings contribute to the depoliticization of precarious labour arrangements and the consolidation of gendered, class-based, and migration-related structural inequalities in the care sector.