Elderly Migrants, Digital Kinning and Digital Home Making Across Time and Distance

Abstract

In this chapter, we problematize notions of home and home making for older migrants by considering their entanglements in places, lives and memories that span the geographically and temporally distant and proximate. We do so by drawing particular attention to the role of online communication technologies and transnational relations of care in their home-making practices and processes. Two case studies are used to illustrate these processes. Although distinctive, they have in common a reliance on new digital communication technologies to help them maintain their identities, communities and families—and thus their sense of home—in the world. This reliance, we argue, is an example of the processes of ‘digital kinning’ that have become an essential tool for migrants to create and sustain imaginaries of home.