Transnational Mobile Carework: Filipino Migrants, Family Intimacy, and Mobile Media

Abstract

Rapidly evolving and ubiquitous digital communication technologies have played a crucial role in shaping the quality and textures of mobile intimacy in transnational family life. In this chapter, we illuminate how transnational caregiving performed through mobile devices and online platforms engenders intimate caregiving from afar. Drawing on data from in-depth interviews, we investigate how elite Filipino migrants in the United States use mobile media and a diverse range of networked platforms to deliver and negotiate caregiving at a distance among their left-behind and aging parents in the Philippines. This study extends the care circulation approach in the context of transnational familial communication through mobile media. We critically examine the role of mobile media in facilitating mediation of everyday and routinized carework, microcoordination of care, the management of tensions and conflicts, and the performance of care. Signicantly, we propose the term ‘mobile carework’ to articulate the intimate, personalised, mobile, and negotiated care practices of transnational family members that are often shaped by the fusion of socio-cultural and technological forces. In sum, this study provides critical insights on how familial intimacies and relations are sustained through the provision of digitalised and differential care routines.