Struggles for Care Infrastructures in Serbia: The Pandemic, Dispossessed Care, and Housing

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic added a new layer of consequences to a care crisis that was already harsh in "post-socialist" Serbia. This paper examines the failures of the care infrastructure in Serbia during the pandemic and the resulting intensification of temporary networks of care. We look at housing as a key care infrastructure in the pandemic and discuss how care thrives across the urban space. To conceptualise how housing is sustained as a care infrastructure in the post-Yugoslav context, we introduce the notion of infra-commoning. We discuss how infra-commoning generates dynamic social and economic reproduction patterns that are the foundation of social organisation. Finally, we analyse anti-eviction struggles as an infracommoning practice and explain how collective efforts of solidarity, mutual aid, and self-care are thwarted and rendered legally impossible.