Global Householding Research Articles

Navigating childrearing, fatherhood, and mobilities: A transnational relational analysis

To overcome the pitfall of methodological nationalism, I propose a transnational relational analysis to examine how people raise children in multi-layered, multi-sited transnational social fields, involving the interconnection of different sorts of mobilities and immobilities. Drawing on three cases of fatherhood in the contexts of migration and transnationalism – the transnational middle class in Taiwan, Taiwanese immigrants with professional jobs in the US, and Taiwanese fathers who married wives from China or Southeast Asia – this article illustrates how fathers navigate childrearing and negotiate masculinity in relation to local and transnational reference groups. A transnational relational analysis interrogates the experiences of global householding in a relational manner, revealing visible and invisible links between those who move and those who stay. The framework offers a theoretical tool to unpack the social process and emotional politics in which individuals navigate spatial and social divides to search for security and dignity and to bring to the fore the global formation of class, race, and gender relations.

Global householding and gendered citizenship: Family visits as care support for Vietnamese marriage migrants in South Korea

The citizenship of marriage migrants in South Korea has been discussed in terms of their roles as mothers in the context of Korea’s aging population and care crisis. However, as marriage migrants increasingly participate in the labor market, their individual rights as workers, and more specifically as working mothers, bring attention to the question of women’s citizenship in South Korea. Care provision is a key issue in the discussion on working mothers’ citizenship. This article focuses on global householding as a process of supporting the participation of marriage migrants in paid work. It highlights the role of the natal family of marriage migrants, especially their parents, as sources of care support to marriage migrants as well as recipients of care. The family visits of the parents of marriage migrants show how parents participate in the internationalization of social reproduction. This article contributes to understanding the household and family as a unit of analysis in the discussion of social reproduction and citizenship in East Asia. It also raises the issue of the embedded gender division of labor in the process of global householding.

Translocal family reproduction and agrarian change in China: a new analytical framework

ABSTRACTThis paper advances a new framework for analysing agrarian change in rural China and elsewhere in developing Asia, which centres on translocal family reproduction. The framework highlights the crucial connections between rural families’ translocal strategies for meeting reproductive (especially care) needs, their changing aspirations for reproduction, and other aspects of agrarian change, including de-peasantisation, de-agrarianisation and social differentiation. In developing this framework, the paper refers to a village case study in central China and draws on a critique of the ‘livelihoods perspective’ on agrarian change, approaches focusing on ‘global householding’, and the cultural reproduction of class and gender.

Repensar los cuidados a la luz de la reproducción social: una propuesta para vincular los circuitos migratorios

Los cuidados se han convertido en un elemento predominante en gran parte de las investigaciones feministas sobre migraciones globalizadas y la transferencia de trabajo del Sur al Norte. El concepto de reproducción, en cambio, ha sido relegado durante años a un segundo plano, aunque ahora se está convirtiendo en el foco de los debates sobre la mercantilización de los cuidados en el hogar y las transformaciones de las políticas del estado de bienestar. Este artículo sostiene que, si vinculamos los diversos circuitos de migración y, sobre todo, los relacionados con el empleo y la familia, podremos comprender mejor las diferentes formas y recorridos de los cuidados en la reproducción de personas, familias y comunidades, tanto migrantes como no migrantes. Para ello, me retrotraigo a los trabajos estadounidenses sobre minorías racializadas y migrantes, así como sobre reproducción social estratificada. Asimismo, tomo algunas ideas de los actuales estudios asiáticos sobre circuitos migratorios generizados que establecen vínculos entre las migraciones por empleo y por matrimonio. También uso la noción de ‘familias transnacionales’ que pone de manifiesto cómo operan las políticas de género de la reproducción social, tanto en el seno como más allá de las familias, los hogares y las estructuras institucionales y de bienestar. Al contrario que en Asia, los estudios europeos apenas se han centrado en la vinculación que existe entre las migraciones laborales y las familiares desde el punto de vista de la reproducción social. Sin embargo, relacionar los diferentes tipos de migraciones permite comprender en su complejidad las trayectorias de los cuidados y el modo en que éstas contribuyen a la reproducción social.

The Geo-Social and Global Geographies of Power: Urban Aspirations of ‘Worlding’ African Students in China

ABSTRACTThis paper conceptualises the geosocial by examining the transnational connections of African student migrants and their educational experiences in Chinese cities. While there is now an established scholarship on Chinese migration to Africa, new research on the concurrent flow of African migration to China is emerging. Recent publications on African migrants in China tend to focus on the experiences of African traders, drawing out issues of illegality, ‘low-end’ globalisation and their impacts on Chinese trading cities. In comparison, this paper shifts the analytical lens to African educational migration in Chinese cities, foregrounding how global householding patterns reflect and leverage on the geopolitical and geo-economic dimensions of China-Africa relations. The paper shows that individual and family goals are negotiated through educational migration that, on the one hand, is concerned with accumulating human and cultural capital through a learning stint in Chinese cities, and on the other hand, is framed by perceptions of China-Africa relations. The paper argues that through educational migration, transnational social reproduction links Africa with China, but the social differentiation and everyday sociality that the African students experience in Chinese cities reinforce racial coding and development asymmetries. In so doing, the paper draws out how the geosocial reflects and constitutes the geopolitical and geo-economic dimensions of transnationalism.

Hesitant Madams in a Global City: Japanese Expat Wives and their Global Householding in Hong Kong

Care work, once a sanctioned labor of love, is increasingly commodified in transnational contexts. The picture of migrant women shouldering the housework and child care of local professonal women may seem like a mutually beneficial arrangement—matching the “needs” of the haves and have‐nots—, but the global care chain ultimately works to maintain the traditional gendered division of labor as well as global inequality. To this trend of globalization of care work, Japan has been an exception; however, how much longer it will be so is now in a question, as the government paves the way for importing domestic labor from abroad. This article focuses on Japanese expat wives in Hong Kong in order to locate Japanese women vis‐à‐vis the global care chain. The narrative analysis on how they decide whether to hire a domestic worker in their home away from home highlights the sociopolitical nature of their supposedly private choices. Some drew on cultural ideal of wifehood and motherhood to rationalize their choice while others referred to racialized or even overtly racist and classist images of foreign domestic workers. A few women spoke against the system itself, showing awareness of its inherent social injustice. All such narratives are never purely personal; their decisions and the rationalization behind them sustain the prevailing discourses of gender, race, ethnicity, culture, and class, which, in turn, envelop their attempts at global householding.

Singapore's Changing Demography, the Eldercare Predicament and Transnational ‘Care’ Migration

AbstractScholars have recently argued that globalisation processes have significantly altered not just the productive but reproductive sphere. ‘Reproduction’ is formulated to include both biological and social reproduction, and which at the individual level requires ‘care’ throughout the life-cycle – that is, from cradle to grave – in sustaining the body in its corporeal and affective aspects. Concepts that have emerged in the literature in recent decades such as the ‘transnational family’, ‘global householding’ and ‘global care chain’ draw attention to the observation that the formation and sustenance of households is increasingly reliant on the international movement of people and transactions among household members residing in more than one national territory. Applying these notions to the context of the city-state of Singapore where the predicament around eldercare (resulting essentially from rapid fertility decline, shortages of Singapore women's reproductive labour and rigidities in the gender household division of labour) accompanies rapid globalisation, this paper examines strategies of care substitution which draw on the lowly paid labour of two groups of transnational subjects (mainly women) – transnational domestic workers working in the privatised sphere of the home, and transnational healthcare workers in institutionalised settings. The paper reflects upon the interdependencies between flows of transnational care migration and delves into the gender and class implications of these flows for an understanding of the links between transnational migration and social change.

Afterword: Global householding and social reproduction in Asia

The idea of global householding was introduced as an attempt to contribute to four dimensions of migration research: (1) the household as a basic social institution in decisionmaking about migration; (2) the ways in which migration contributes, or does not contribute, to the reproduction of the household; (3) the phenomenal globalization of households in Asia over the past 2 decades; and (4) the relationship between the reproduction of the household and reproduction of society as a whole. This essay highlights the contributions of the authors joining this Special Issue to these dimensions of migration and the household.

Global Householding and Social Reproduction in Migration Research Part Ⅰ : From the Peasantry to Feminist and Political Economy Critiques

Global Householding and Social Reproduction in Migration Research Part Ⅰ : From the Peasantry to Feminist and Political Economy Critiques

Global householding and the negotiation of intimate labour in commercially-matched international marriages between Vietnamese women and Singaporean men

In their work defining the concept of “intimate labor”, Boris and Parrenas (2010, p. 8) cautioned against moral panics about the “commodification of intimacy” in the current era of capitalist globalisation and instead argued that relations of intimacy “already involve the exchange of money”. Drawing on the perspectives of Vietnamese migrant wives and their Singaporean “host country” husbands involved in commercially-arranged marriages, we examine the way they understand and articulate expectations of “love” and the intimate labour that go into constructing marital relationships within homespace. In subjecting this emerging form of “global householding” to scrutiny, we examine consonance and dissonance in expectations and practices of intimate labour between wives and husbands, giving special attention to the role (both practical and symbolic) of money in these relationships. We also note that the practices of intimate labour within homespace not only reflect but also reinforce larger structural inequalities of gender, race, culture and citizenship in both national and transnational contexts.

Sustaining Families across Transnational Spaces: Vietnamese Migrant Parents and their Left-Behind Children

The continually growing number of Asian migrant workers, the majority of whom are in the prime of their reproductive lives and leave families including children behind in their home countries, raises important questions about how families are sustained across transnational spaces. It is our aim in this paper to enhance understanding of the complex relationship between migration and the family in Asia by exploring bonding and parenting efforts between migrant parents and their left-behind children across time and space. In doing so, we draw on and engage with the literature on global householding, transnational families and emotion. Using qualitative data collected from in-depth interviews with carers of left-behind children in Northern Vietnam, the paper also sheds light on children's attitudes and reactions to their parents' migration as well as changes in their feelings over time.

Rethinking Care Through Social Reproduction: Articulating Circuits of Migration

Care has come to dominate much feminist research on globalized migrations and the transfer of labor from the South to the North, while the older concept of reproduction had been pushed into the background but is now becoming the subject of debates on the commodification of care in the household and changes in welfare state policies. This article argues that we could achieve a better understanding of the different modalities and trajectories of care in the reproduction of individuals, families, and communities, both of migrant and nonmigrant populations by articulating the diverse circuits of migration, in particular that of labor and the family. In doing this, I go back to the earlier North American writing on racialized minorities and migrants and stratified social reproduction. I also explore insights from current Asian studies of gendered circuits of migration connecting labor and marriage migrations as well as the notion of global householding that highlights the gender politics of social reproduction operating within and beyond households in institutional and welfare architectures. In contrast to Asia, there has relatively been little exploration in European studies of the articulation of labor and family migrations through the lens of social reproduction. However, connecting the different types of migration enables us to achieve a more complex understanding of care trajectories and their contribution to social reproduction.

Gender, Development and Global Householding

That issues related to migration and global householding are finally being taken seriously by mainstream development institutions is clear from the focus of the United Nation's 2009 Human Development Report. Subtitled Overcoming Barriers: Human Mobility and Development, it is the first major intergovernmental organization publication to view transnational mobility as integral to human development. The report makes a strong case for recognizing that the impact of migration in relation to development aims is significant for both sending and receiving countries. As the report states repeatedly, the old nation-centered growth and antipoverty frameworks and policies no longer fit when migrants work in one country yet send remittances that reduce poverty and promote human development in another country. Similarly, global householding—the reconfiguration of household and family arrangements as people move across national boundaries—necessitates new frameworks for understanding human livelihood strategies at the micro level. In addition to making the case for taking transnational mobility seriously in development policy, the report offers a set of recommendations that are centered on migration management, regularization, and liberalization policies, such as bilateral temporary workers' agreements that allow nations to enhance growth and competitiveness while simultaneously securing their borders.

Global Householding amid Global Crises

Households are an enduring feature of human history. They are the building blocks of social formations in every era and at all scales: from small communities to the global economy. Like families, they “order” social relations in particular ways. But households differ from families by allowing for nonkinship members and by not presuming shared group residence. The emphasis lies, rather, in the pooling of diverse (material and nonmaterial) resources with the purpose of ensuring the continuity of the collective unit. Michael Douglass (2006, 423) deploys the term householding to underscore how “creating and sustaining a household is a continuous process of social reproduction that covers all life-cycle stages and extends beyond the family.” Global householding references the many ways in which these processes increasingly occur across national boundaries, for example, through transborder marriages, overseas education, labor migration, and war displacements. The psychological, sociocultural, economic, and political implications of these processes are extraordinarily complex and arguably involve as much as one-quarter of the world's population.

Gender Politics and Global Householding in International Student/Scholar Families

Global householding encompasses a variety of (re)configurations of family and household arrangements due to people on the move across national boundaries (Douglass 2006). My essay focuses on global householding associated with educational migration, and in particular, the flow of students and scholars from Asia to the United States.

Global Householding and Care Networks: Filipino Women in Japan

Women's movement away from their own home has been described as migration and the reason for their migration often labeled as economic. Despite testimonies that point to emotion, particularly care and concern for the members of their households as the primary reason for their decision to move, women's move beyond their homes is still considered as basically economic, and still confined within the conventional rubric of migration studies, rather than viewed as expanded householding. Analyzing past and recent data collated since the 1990s up to the present, this paper follows the trail of care and householding from the homes of origin of women from the Philippines to Japan to show the importance of care and emotion for understanding human movements, to further analyze the link between domestic and global care and householding, and to further explore the interrelationship of globalization, the international division of care, and householding.

Migrant domestic workers in Korea: The effects of global householding on Korean-Chinese domestic workers

As international migration grows in scale and geographical scope, hiring foreign domestic workers has also increased in many industrialised countries. Thus 'global householding' is emerging both in receiving and sending countries. Korea is no exception to this trend. Compared to other rapidly industrialising economies in Asia such as Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan, however, hiring foreign domestic workers has been a less popular option for Korean households. The major groups of migrant domestic workers are Korean-Chinese (69%) and Chinese (29%), but less than 1% are Filipinos who are popular domestic workers in other Asian countries. To clarify these observations, this paper will examine: 1) why and how Korean households began to hire foreign domestic workers; 2) how and why Korean-Chinese women monopolise the foreign domestic worker market; 3) why hiring foreign domestic workers is not popular in Korea; and 4) the impact that working in Korea has on Korean-Chinese women's families at home.

Global householding in Pacific Asia

The term 'householding' is used to underscore the ways in which creating and sustaining a household is a continuous process of social reproduction that covers all life-cycle stages and extends beyond the family. Householding in Pacific (East and Southeast) Asia is now 'going global' at a very rapid rate as measured by increases in trans-border marriages, international adoption of children, educating children abroad, hiring foreign domestic helpers and retirement migration from higher- to lower-income economies. While global householding is seen as a way of compensating for and improving upon householding solely within territorial boundaries, it meets formidable resistance by governments and societies alike. Trends towards the expansion of the many dimensions of global householding can nonetheless be expected to continue, presenting profound challenges to all societies in the region.

Global householding in a city-state: Emerging trends in Singapore

As a small city-state scarce in natural resources and aspiring to become a major player in a globalised world, Singapore exemplifies an urban node criss-crossed by transnational practices and networks of capital, labour, business and commodity markets, and cultural flows. The social, cultural and economic fabric of this city-state is thus not only woven out of local elements but involves a high density of transnational relationships. Singapore hence provides an important test-bed for the main hypothesis of the concept of global householding, that is, the observation that the formation and sustenance of households is increasingly reliant on the international movement of people and transactions among household members residing in more than one national territory. In this light, this paper seeks to provide a broad overview of recent changes and trends in the structure and shape of the household in Singapore. These include the formation of transnational Singaporean households with different members located in...

'Wild geese fathers' and a globalised family strategy for education in Korea

This article examines one interesting form of global householding practised among Korean middle-class families: transnational families split across oceans for the purpose of children's early education, called kirogi families. Based on statistical data and interviews with a small sample of kirogi fathers, this study describes the rapid growth in the numbers of Korean students going abroad for early English education and examines the main motivations for the kirogi family arrangement. Our analysis suggests the growing power of English as a critical asset of occupational mobility and the problems of the exam-oriented Korean educational system as the main sources of this phenomenon. Our interview data suggest that the fathers are not mere passive or reluctant participants in the family splitting and that they seem to maintain a stable conjugal relationship as well as a strong supportive role for the children despite their physical separation from the family.