In the Meantime of Informal Care: Navigating Temporal Tensions in Timebanking CSCW020

This paper examines how informal care work in community-based aging systems is assetized through the institutionalization of timebanking. Drawing on long-term ethnography following the implementation of digital timebanking systems as part of government-led aging-in-community initiatives in Shanghai, this paper teases out the labor of navigating multi-layered temporal tensions in informal caregiving, from interactional to personal to generational. We demonstrate how present informal care work has been transformed into exchangeable, bankable, and quantifiable assets, promising future social and economic benefits. We analyze how timebanking assetizes, institutionalizes, and governs informal care work by mobilizing younger generations of older adults (i.e., those recently retired) to perform unpaid caregiving for older generations in the communities under the rhetoric of mutual support and uncertain promises of future care. We discuss how CSCW can critically engage with the temporal navigations that are integral to informal care work, particularly in the context of demographic shifts, labor shortages, and the broken formal aging care infrastructure. From there, we question whether timebanking constitutes a sustainable sociotechnical alternative to formal care systems, or if it is increasingly co-opted for labor extraction that reproduces the precarity of aging futures.