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. 2022 Oct 14;59(1):486–493. doi: 10.1002/pra2.657

Intersectional Information Work Practices: Surfacing Care amidst COVID‐19

Poole 1, Alex H Poole 1,✉
PMCID: PMC9874527  PMID: 36714433

ABSTRACT

This paper brings together and enriches the heretofore dispersed literature on information work and information practices. It does so under the auspices of Critical Race Theory (CRT), specifically intersectionality, and care work. Using the COVID‐19 pandemic in the United States as the context for an exploratory, qualitative case study, we propose the concept of intersectional information work practices (IIWP) to denote the cluster of information‐centric tasks in which Black women carers engaged. Seeking, scanning, searching, monitoring, finding, receiving, retrieving, using, and sharing information—Black women carers performed each of these IIWPs in dealing with health care providers, tests, illness and treatment, wellness, logistics, and avoiding misinformation. An IIWP lens sheds light on the too often invisible labor of Black women carers. Such a lens also brings into high relief the importance of scrutinizing power and (in)equity, race, gender, and class in exploring foundational Information Science concepts.

Keywords: diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI), information practices, Information work, intersectionality, social justice

INTRODUCTION

By late 2021, over 270 million cases of COVID‐19 had been reported globally, and more than 5.3 million deaths (Coronavirus Disease 2019 [COVID‐19] Treatment Guidelines, 2022). The pandemic exacerbated the profound “care crisis” facing women of color, especially Black women (Frye, 2020). This care crisis ipso facto constitutes an information crisis.

Based on an exploratory, qualitative case study of the care crisis wrought by COVID‐19, this paper addresses the following research questions. First, how can Critical Race Theory (CRT), particularly its emphasis on intersectionality and structural inequity, enrich our understanding and application of foundational information science concepts such as information work and information practices? Second, how might the heretofore disparate concepts of information work and information practices be brought together fruitfully?

We propose the concept of intersectional information work practices (IIWP) to denote the cluster of information‐centric tasks in which Black women carers engaged during COVID. First, we discuss our methodological approach; it is a qualitative case study rooted in documentary evidence. Next, we review the literature and adumbrate a new concept, intersectional information work practices (IIWP). Third, we explore IIWP through the experiences of Black women carers during COVID‐19. We conclude with suggestions for further research to augment the conceptual foundations and practical applications of IIWP.

During COVID, Black women undertook intersectional information work practices for themselves and those for whom they cared. Combating structural racism, they persisted as empowered actors who spearheaded an ongoing struggle for human dignity and equity (Collins, 2000).

METHODS

Following Yin (2009), this exploratory case study seeks to describe, explain, and understand complex current phenomena in depth. We relied upon multiple sources of documentary evidence in service of trustworthiness and transferability (on documents as evidence, see Bowen [2009]; Hodder [2000]; Lincoln & Guba [1985]; Prior [2003]; Shenton [2013]; Wildemuth [2009]). We located documents through berrypicking: iterative searches involving footnote chasing, citation searching, journal run browsing, database searching and browsing (e.g. by subject, keyword, and author), and a bevy of diverse primary and secondary sources ranging from peer‐reviewed journal articles to periodicals to reports published by non‐profits (Bates, 1989). Our coding proceeded from initial to focused (Charmaz, 2014; Corbin & Strauss, 1990). Befitting exploratory research, our analysis is inductive and iterative, viz., grounded in and emerging from the data (Bernard & Ryan, 2010).

LITERATURE REVIEW

Synergizing the literature on Critical Race Theory (CRT), invisible work, care work, and information work and information practices, this paper proposes a new concept: intersectional information work practices (IIWP).

Critical Race Theory (CRT)

Critical Race Theory draws upon Critical Legal Theory, feminism, and civil rights discourses to advance three claims (Berger & Guidroz, 2009; Cho et al., 2013; Crenshaw, 1989, 2002, 2011; Crenshaw et al., 2006; Delgado & Stefancic, 2001; Donnor & Ladson‐Billings, 2018; McCall, 2005). First, although a social construct, race exerts seismic real‐world impact; it is quotidian and normative. Second, whiteness confers both invisible and visible, psychological and material, privileges and rewards. Third, CRT centers anti‐essentialism (overlapping and possibly conflicting identities and loyalties characterize every individual) and intersectionality. Intersectionality holds that both formal and informal power systems function according to and receive reinforcement from hierarchical, simultaneous, and imbricated oppressions, especially race, ethnicity, class, and gender.

Historically, Black women faced uniquely imbricated burdens stemming especially if not exclusively from race, gender, and class (Branch, 2011; Collins, 1993, 2000, 2015; Davis, 1983; Gaines, 1997; Giddings, 1984; Graham, 2007; Higginbotham, 1996; Hine, 1986; Jones, 1998; King, 1988; Poole, 2018; Poster et al., 2016b; Wingfield, 2019). Yet Black women resisted oppression and demoralization; they carved out spaces of influence in institutions that permitted Black women nominal agency (Brown, 2008; Collins, 2000; Greene, 2005; Higginbotham, 1993; Hine, 1989; hooks, 1981; Shaw, 2010).

CRT ultimately challenges whiteness's normative, privileged status. It promotes change by raising consciousness and making space for marginalized and oppressed voices (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001; Dunbar, 2006). Therefore, CRT and intersectionality confer visibility on the lived work experiences of Black women.

Invisible work

Work constitutes human activities involving explicitly or implicitly understood purposes, meanings, and economic or symbolic values (Budd, 2016; Huvila, 2008). In contrast to leisure, work pivots around increasing the world's intersubjective value for others (Cholbi, 2022). Work depends on tasks, particular items of labor executed simultaneously or sequentially (Strauss, 1985). Each task has a recognizable beginning and end, requirements, a purpose both meaningful and legitimate, and a pragmatic goal (Byström & Hansen, 2005; Byström & Lloyd, 2012).

While visible work is publicly accomplished, recognized, and compensated, much work, including care work, remains invisible and undervalued, even as it enables daily activities materially and psychically (Star & Strauss, 1999). This invisibility harms individuals physically, psychically, and materially (Poster et al., 2016a). Black women have long been indispensable but invisible workers. Historically, racism, sexism, and classism consigned Black women to the lowest paid, least desired jobs, especially domestic service‐cum‐care work (Giddings, 1984). Illuminating invisible work permits the restoration both of agency and more important, of credit, to those who undertake it (Star, 1991). A fundamental part of Black women's invisible work is care work.

Care work

Care work constitutes the activities and tasks that contribute to, maintain, or manage individuals' prosaic wellbeing (Corbin & Strauss, 1988; Dwyer, 2013; Folbre, 2001; Glenn, 2010). It comprises direct caring (physical caring such as feeding, emotional caring such as communicating, and caring services such as transporting or accompanying the cared‐for to appointments), care for physical surroundings (such as cleaning or washing), and care for personal and social relationships (Glenn, 2010). Under‐supported and underpaid, tarred as illegitimate and inauthentic, care work is feminized, racialized, and classicized (DeVault, 2014; DuMonthier et al., 2017; England, 2005; Glenn, 2010; Hochschild, 2013; Nesbitt‐Ahmed & Subrahmanian, 2020; O'Hara, 2014; Oxfam et al., 2020). Potential costs include stress, anxiety, frustration, isolation, exhaustion, poor work‐life balance, health, family destabilization, career retardation, and poverty (Altman, 2021; Chadiha et al., 2004; DuMonthier et al., 2017; Wingfield, 2019).

COVID‐19 exacerbated an already egregious care deficit (Glenn, 2010; Robertson & Gebeloff, 2020). Paradoxically, while the care sector boomed—Black women cared for their own and others' children and grandchildren, the elderly, and individuals with disabilities—their wages failed to keep pace (Chadiha et al., 2004; DuMonthier et al., 2017; Frye, 2020). One pre‐COVID study showed that nearly one in four Black adults worked as informal carers for friends or family members, and three‐fifths (61%) of these carers were women. Nearly half had provided care for at least two years, nearly one third provided care for at least 20 hours a week, more than four fifths managed household tasks, and over half assisted with personal care (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2019). Despite social, economic, bodily, and psychological adversity, even injury, Black women caregivers showed tremendous resilience (Chadiha et al., 2004). Their care work depended heavily upon both information work and the latter's underpinning information practices.

Information work and information practices: a call for synthesis

Scholars have yet to bring together the complementary concepts of information work and information practices (Savolainen, 2007). Supporting other lines of work such as care work, information work demands time, effort, and resources. It involves the mundane seeking, searching, finding, receiving, sharing, disseminating, using, and avoiding information in service of organizing, coordinating, planning, instructing, networking, and training (Corbin & Strauss, 1988; Dalmer & Huvila, 2019; Hogan & Palmer, 2006; Huvila et al., 2016; Strauss et al., 1985).

Highlighting IW restores agency and visibility to those who do it. It reminds us that information work is not only legitimate but may be life‐altering even if performed invisibly. In the context of care, for example, information work minimizes, stabilizes, and repairs the daily disruptions wrought by illness (Souden, 2008).

Grounded in practice theory (Bourdieu, 1990, 1995; Certeau, 1984; Giddens, 1984; Schatzki et al., 2001), information practices take root in the groups and communities that constitute the social and cultural contexts of individuals' customary, everyday activities (Fulton & Henefer, 2017; Savolainen, 2007; Schatzki, 2012). Embedded infrastructurally, artifactually, and linguistically, information practices involve regular, repeated, socially‐understood meaning‐making actions both formal and informal. Like information work, these information practices include seeking, scanning, searching, monitoring, retrieving, using, and sharing information. These interactive, habitual, social and cultural processes both generate knowledge and enable its use (Byström & Lloyd, 2012; Corradi et al., 2010; Fulton & Henefer, 2017; Huizing & Cavanagh, 2011; Lloyd, 2009; McKenzie, 2002, 2003; Olsson & Lloyd, 2017; Reckwitz, 2002; Savolainen, 2007).

We contend that information practices underpin and enable information work. The concept of IWPs, that is to say, calls deserved attention to work's regularized, social, interactive, and embodied character. In other words, while all information work is composed of information practices, not all information practices constitute information work. Context, then, is the sine qua non in delineating IW from IP. Information seeking, searching, sharing, and use for leisure purposes, for example, differ vastly from information seeking, searching, sharing, and use for lifegiving care. Bringing together not only information practices and information work, but intersectionality, IIWPs illuminate the constellation of Black women carers’ essential information activities during COVID‐19.

COVID‐19 AND INTERSECTIONAL INFORMATION WORK PRACTICES

The pandemic's care crisis shows the value of considering CRT and intersectionality vis‐à‐vis information work practices. Racial and ethnic minorities in the United States endured higher rates of COVID‐19 infection, hospitalization, and death than whites. This stemmed from economic inequality, neighborhood disadvantage, lack of access to health care, overrepresentation in hazardous work environments, and health disparities (Coronavirus Disease 2019 [COVID‐19] Treatment Guidelines, 2022). During COVID, therefore, care workers of color stared down an “’epidemic within the pandemic’” (Pryor & Tomaskovic‐Devy, 2020).

Black women comprised an indispensable but effectively invisible component of the care infrastructure. Only 6% of the workforce, they made up approximately 11% of essential workers (Carrazana, 2020). Overall, women of color comprised more than 30% of health care and social assistance workers; they were disproportionately represented among health care support workers, direct care workers, health care service workers, and childcare workers (Frye, 2020; Kinder, 2020; Robertson & Gebeloff, 2020).

At the intersection of multiple structures and systems of oppression rooted in race, ethnicity, gender, and class, carers of color grappled with disproportionate mental and physical illness, unemployment, and mortality rates (COVID‐19 Treatment Guidelines Panel, 2021; Frye, 2020; Jackson & Pederson, 2020; Nesbitt‐Ahmed & Subrahmanian, 2020; Oxfam et al., 2020). These carers were more than five times as likely to contract COVID‐19 than whites (Nguyen et al., 2020). Black women not only suffered high rates of exposure but were precluded from staying home to care for others or even for themselves (Frye, 2020; Kinder, 2020). Their work conditions triggered stress, exhaustion, and burnout (Wingfield, 2020). Given a lack of legal protection that exacerbated extant occupational segregation, moreover, COVID‐19 economically crippled Black women (Carrazana, 2020; Frye, 2020; Pryor & Tomaskovic‐Devy, 2020). Women comprised the vast majority (82%) of those working health care jobs that pay under $30,000; half are nonwhite (Robertson & Gebeloff, 2020). Ultimately, Pryor and Tomaskovic‐Devy (2020) identified an invidious “feed‐forward loop”: “structural inequity leads to disproportionate representation in low‐paying jobs, simultaneously reinforces unequal rates of COVID infection, and increases community spread and risk of death.” Despite this adversity, Black women's care work, rooted in IIWPs, proved essential in weathering the pandemic.

The clinical spectrum of COVID‐19 ranges from asymptomatic to critical illness. COVID‐19 may induce respiratory viral infections (e.g., influenza) or failure, community‐acquired pneumonia, congestive heart dysfunction or failure, asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease exacerbations, septic shock, or exacerbation of underlying comorbidities (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2020; COVID‐19 Treatment Guidelines Panel, 2021). Possible long‐term effects are similarly grievous. The elderly and those with preexisting conditions remain at greater risk. The demand for care work was unprecedented.

The National Institutes of Health enjoined COVID‐19 carers to predicate patient management plans on the cared‐for's vital signs, the results of examinations, risk factors for illness progression, and the availability of resources (COVID‐19 Treatment Guidelines Panel, 2021). Usually mediated by technology, IIWPs proved essential in a bevy of treatment activities over the course of individuals’ COVID‐19 illness trajectories (Corbin & Strauss, 1988; Strauss et al., 1985).

Whether paid or unpaid, performed for family or others, in‐patient or outpatient, IIWPs occurred in both formal and informal, public and private spaces. Black women carers performed IIWPs on their own behalf and on that of the cared‐for. Potential information sources included medical professionals (physicians, nurses, counselors), literature (periodicals, brochures, newsletters), friends or peers, mainstream and social media, and the web (Hogan & Palmer, 2006). Seeking, scanning, searching, monitoring, finding, receiving, retrieving, using, and sharing information—Black women engaged in each of these IIWPs in executing exemplary caring tasks such as 1) dealing with health care providers; 2) tests, illness, and treatment; 3) wellness; 4) logistics; and 5) avoiding misinformation (Coronavirus Disease 2019 [COVID‐19] Treatment Guidelines, 2022; COVID‐19 Treatment Guidelines Panel, 2021; Mayo Clinic Staff, 2022).

First, carers help the cared‐for choose, contact, communicate with, or change medical providers. Carers also help schedule and execute telehealth or in‐person follow‐up visits. Second, carers settle on and schedule appropriate tests (e.g. the nucleic acid amplification test [NAAT] or antigen‐based diagnostic tests) for the cared‐for. Carers also convey and help the cared‐for interpret test results.

Third, carers monitor the illness symptoms and treatment prognoses of the cared‐for. This monitoring assumes particular importance given the constant mutations of COVID‐19. Further, COVID‐19 sufferers face the possibility of concomitant viral infections such as influenza as well as the reactivation of latent infections. Carers help the cared‐for track and maintain treatment regimens, including medicine (whether over the counter or prescription) or dosage requirements or changes, as well as possible side effects and drug interactions or counterindications. They may administer symptomatic treatments such as hydration, antipyretics, analgesics, and antitussives as needed for, e.g., fever, headache, myalgias, and cough.

Fourth, carers promote and maintain the cared‐for's physical and mental wellness. Carers review and select personal protective equipment and other equipment such as respirators for the cared‐for to reduce the risk of (re)transmission. In this, they evaluate information concerning masks (e.g. N95 versus other types such as surgical), and other PPE such as gloves, gowns, and eye protection. Additionally, carers vet and choose appropriate cleaning and disinfecting products; they also monitor the cleanliness of spaces and clothing, bedding, and other materials.

Carers help determine and ensure proper nutrition for the cared‐for, which includes food and drink purchasing and preparation. Other wellness measures include physical therapy and ambulation or exercise, stretching, deep breathing, and meditation, rest and sleep, hydration, and abstinence from alcohol and tobacco. Carers also attend to the cared‐for's mental health, for example by securing emotional support and connect between the cared‐for and others, and by encouraging the cared‐for to focus on enjoyable activities.

Similarly, carers arrange for transportation, e.g. to doctor visits and pharmacies, and deal with other logistical priorities and exigencies. Also of vital importance to promoting wellness, carers interpret charts, reports, and forms. They decipher bureaucratese and medical jargon, for instance in dealing with insurance claims and financial or billing matters such as co‐pays or deductibles.

Fifth, carers help the cared‐for avoid misinformation. For example, the FDA warns against relying solely on a serologic COVID‐19 test. It also recommends against interferons, nitazoxanide, and hydroxychloroquine, chloroquine, and azithromycin as treatments, and does not recommend ivermectin. Remdesivir is the only FDA‐approved drug. Medical misinformation aside, carers ensure the cared‐for is not overwhelmed emotionally by COVID news.

CONCLUSION

Bringing together CRT and intersectionality, care work, information work, and information practices under the conceptual auspices of IIWP during COVID‐19 represents a productive way not only to restore agency to the lived experiences of Black women, but more broadly to enrich information science's theoretical base. As a fundamental part of care labor, IIWPs constitute authentic, legitimate work. Further, IIWPs underscore the need to consider a more nuanced view of information work practices that considers questions of power and (in)equity, especially vis‐à‐vis race, gender, and class.

Spatial limitations conspire against us providing but a brief overview of IIWPs. Future research might explore four questions. First, how might the concept of IIWP be extended to domains beyond the caring? Second, how might the IIWP framework illuminate the lived experiences of other marginalized groups or communities not only in the United States, but internationally? Third, COVID‐19 aside, how might IIWP apply to more ordinary, non‐crisis work situations? Finally, how might qualitative interviews with Black women carers complement this paper's findings?

COVID‐19 is a clarion call to prioritize care workers' safety, to ensure they receive a living wage, and to expand their paid leave (Carrazana, 2020; Frye, 2020; Kinder, 2020). Recognizing Black women's labor as shown through their intersectional information work practices is a just way to honor their resilience.

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