Transnational Family Care Research Articles

Unravelling the tensions: exploring the interplay of paid care work, family obligations, and transnational care among Zimbabwean migrant care workers in the UK

ABSTRACT An increasing number of studies have examined the impact of migration on reconciling familial care obligations with demanding paid care work. However, much of this research focuses on women who employ migrant care workers and ignores the experiences of migrant care workers balancing their jobs with their own familial responsibilities. As a result, little is known about how migrant care workers navigate local contexts, form families, and manage work and childcare in destination countries while maintaining commitments at home. This paper explores the family dynamics and transnational lives of Zimbabwean migrant care workers in the UK. It draws on qualitative interviews with 10 participants to elaborate on the additional challenges they face in reconciling paid care work with localized and transnational family care. The analysis highlights that migrant workers must simultaneously respond to the care demands of their families and employers, often causing tensions as gendered care expectations are challenged. To manage these difficulties in balancing work and family, Zimbabwean care workers employ various strategies that sometimes strain familial relationships. This study provides insight into the intersection of migrant care workers’ paid labour and familial care obligations across borders.

Conditioning grandparent care-labour mobility at the care-migration systems nexus: Australia and the UK

ABSTRACT A ‘transnational turn’ in welfare regime theory has disrupted methodologically nationalist analyses of care regimes generating analytical frameworks that capture the interdependencies between care and migration regimes. Those frameworks share a focus on migration for paid care labour as the vehicle connecting care and migration regimes transnationally. In this paper, we highlight familial care-labour mobility as an additional mechanism connecting care and migration regimes across borders. Drawing on the care circulation framework, we argue that a focus on these informal global care chains helps to bridge macro structural level approaches of the frameworks that focus on paid care labour with the more micro-level transnational family care approach. We focus on grandparent care-labour mobility, arguing that while it is ‘familial’, ‘informal’, ‘private’ and ‘invisible’, its dynamics and the lived experiences of those entwined within it, are mediated at the care-migration systems nexus. Through case-studies on grandparent care-labour mobility between China and Australia and India and the UK, we examine how the care-migration systems nexus is shaped by the prevailing logic of neoliberalism and ensuing patterns of stratification within care and migration systems. We conclude by highlighting the need for a transnational ethics of family care to govern the care-migration systems nexus.

Intensive care: Mediatized parenting and the circulation of transnational family care between Hong Kong and the Philippines

Studies of transnational families have explored the various approaches by which separated members of the family exchange care across distance. In the context of the Philippines, transnational caregiving is widely studied as transnational mothering, looking at how migrant mothers balance their breadwinning and mothering roles using available communications. In this article, I investigated how the circulation of global care among migrant families is increasingly and intensively mediatized in the past decades. Using Andreas Hepp’s (2013) mediatization approach and Loretta Baldassar and Laura Merla’s (2014) care circulation framework, I conducted interviews with 20 migrant parents in Hong Kong and their 25 left-behind children in the Philippines to reveal the stories of how digital and convergent technologies have altered the communicative practices surrounding the four main modes of transnational care circulation: gifts, cross-border mobilities, remittances, and transnational communication. I have also found how mediatized parenting is now a more intensive and embodied mode of distant caring that has sustained families across borders. This study aims to contribute to the mediatization research paradigm and draw practical implications for sustaining families affected by this transnational phenomenon.

Ageing, migration infrastructure and multi‐generational care dynamics in transnational families

AbstractThe analysis of transnational family relations from an intergenerational to a multi‐generational perspective highlights the significant role migration infrastructure plays in transnational family care arrangements at different family life stages. Changing migration policies and local‐bound welfare systems in the host and home countries tend to fixate the role of care‐receiver and provider against fluid transnational family care dynamics as the life course of the family unfolds. This paper focuses on Chinese transnational one‐child families in which the initial separation between parents and their only‐child was motivated by the child's overseas education, and followed by the adult child's employment and family formation in the UK. My findings illustrate how reified definitions of the family and familial roles structure mobile individuals’ access to family rights in a transnational context. They warn of the danger of entrenched injustice embedded in the definitional classification of family migrants.

Introduction to the Special Issue: “Transnational Family Care ‘On Hold’? Intergenerational Relationships and Obligations in the Context of Immobility Regimes”

This special issue explores how members of transnational families manage their intergenerational care obligations in the context of increasing restrictions to cross–border mobility. We ask: How do ...

Expanding transnational care networks: comparing caring for families with caring for homes

AbstractAlthough many factors may motivate a migrant to own a house in their country of origin, significant practical labour is needed to maintain it, as both a material structure intended for shelter and as a symbolic object reflecting attachment to a place of origin. Most research in this area focuses on the significance accorded to transnational houses by their owners and families connoted by the ‘myth of return’, but little attention has been given to how the labour of ownership – constructing, maintaining, overseeing and improving the house – is accomplished. In the light of emerging studies on the care labour that remittance houses require, this article suggests a theoretical framework for studying networks of transnational house maintenance on three dimensions of care – trust, communication, and remittances – observed in networks for transnational family care provisions. A review of literature on transnational home ownership indicates that these dimensions are also present, with some differences in application.

The financialisation of transnational family care: a study of UK-based senders of remittances to Ghana and Nigeria

AbstractTransnational families occupy centre-stage in literatures on transformations in the social organisation and relations of care and welfare because they express how social bonds are sustained despite geographical separation. This paper examines some key themes arising from a research study into remittance-sending practices of UK-based Ghanaians and Nigerians in the light of research literatures on transnational family care and development finance. The data comprises qualitative interviews with 20 UK-based Ghanaian and Nigerian people who regularly send remittances to their families ‘back home’. This paper discusses a social issue that arises from the transnationalisation of family structures and relations, when migrant family members are positioned within family networks as ‘absent providers’, and familial relations eventually become financialised. The findings show the complexities of transnational living, the hardships endured by remittance-senders and the particular strains of remittance-mediated family relationships. The financialisation of family relations affects the social subjectivity and positioning of remittance-senders within the family. Strain and privation are integral to participants’ experiences of transnational family life, while themes of deception, betrayal, and expatriation also feature. The suppression of emotion is a feature of the significant labour inputs participants make in sustaining relationships within transnational families. The paper considers UK social policy implications of the findings.

Here or there? Gendered return migration to Bolivia from Spain during economic crisis and fluctuating migration policies

ABSTRACTThis article's aims are twofold: to consider the motivations for return migrations to Bolivia from Spain in a context of economic crisis and to explore the impact of recent Spanish migration policies using a transnational family perspective. Migrants’ decisions to return home are embedded in the gendered allocation of economic and reproductive responsibilities and patriarchal ideology in Bolivian homes. Spain's tightened immigration regulations of 2007 limited circular migration between the two countries for the majority of Bolivians in Spain. In contrast, a window for citizenship acquisition opened for approximately one-third of Bolivians in Spain between 2012 and 2015. With dual Bolivian and Spanish citizenship, their freedom to travel between the two countries has afforded them far more scope for meeting transnational family care and provisioning responsibilities.

Transnational families and the circulation of care: a Romanian–German case study

ABSTRACTThis article contributes to our understanding of transnational family relationships and the circulation of care. We are interested in understanding how large-scale emigration affects the support and care of older people in the origin country. Using in-depth interviews and participant observation, we examine the significance of transnational family support for older people, and the ways in which migrant children and other kin care for elderly relatives from afar. Our case study is of the Transylvanian Saxons, a German-speaking minority in Romania, who experienced mass-exodus to Germany following the end of socialism in 1990. The lapse of time since the exodus allows us to examine how transnational family practices evolve, and what the challenges are to maintaining family-hood over time and distance. Contrary to expectations, we find that material family support from Germany to Romania is not significant and has declined. Care, by contrast, remains an important part of what most transnational families provide, although practices of ‘caring about’ are more prevalent than hands-on ‘caring for’. Counter to optimistic accounts of transnational family care in the literature, we argue that the difficulties and challenges for older people of being cared for by distant family members are fundamental, and strong transnational family ties are not an inevitable outcome of migration.

Situating transnational activities: Peruvian migrants’ family visits in a comparative perspective

Migrants’ transnational activities have become a core matter in migration and transnational family care research. Among these, migrants’ visits in the country of origin are of particular interest d...

Cross-border mobility and long-distance communication as modes of care circulation: insights from the Peruvian ‘zero generation’

ABSTRACTThe contribution of older family members in the sending countries to the well-being of transnational families has only recently come more into the focus of research. Cross-border mobility and long-distance communication are two central modes through which the members of this ‘zero generation’ engage in transnational family life. By applying the framework of care circulation, this paper seeks to discuss the influence of cross-border mobility and long-distance communication on older Peruvian non-migrants’ engagement in transnational family care arrangements. The paper shows, first, that political and economic factors, as well as communication infrastructures, shape the patterns of the older Peruvian non-migrants’ involvement in transnational caregiving over time. Second, it shows that cross-border mobility and long-distance communication are key means of living up to expectations of parents and grandparents being present, but are often beyond the older people’s control. Finally, it shows that these older family members create different forms of co-presence based on their professional and religious capabilities not only to provide care and support, but also as a coping mechanism.

Migrant Financial Remittances—Between Development Policy and Transnational Family Care

AbstractFor some time now, migrant financial remittances internationally have been the target of politics and research in many ways. However, the predominant focus of looking at remittances is from a development perspective. This article looks at this approach from a critical perspective and calls for an expansion of the discussion on remittances by linking financial remittances and transnational family care.

Transnational family networks in the Somali diaspora in Egypt: women's roles and differentiated experiences

Diasporic Somalis are increasingly leading a transnational life in which family members are sustained through networks of relations, obligations and resources that are located in different nation-states. These networks and relations enable diasporic Somalis to seek safety for themselves and their relatives, minimize risks and maximize family resources. In this article, I examine three key dimensions of such a way of life, namely: migration; remittances; and transnational family care. I focus on the roles that women play in this family-based support system. For instance, women move and facilitate the movement of other family members; they remit to family members; and they provide care for children and sick relatives. But these transnational households are not free from tensions. Family members are placed in hierarchical relations shaped by age; parental authority; possession of western citizenship; financial resources; and bonds of familial reciprocity and gratitude. Women gain appreciation from relatives and a sense of self-respect for their new roles. Some of the women also make use of the family network to arrange for the care of their children and sick relatives, while they engage in transnational trading activities. However, young and single female relatives often sacrifice or delay their individual dreams because of their familial obligations. I conclude that transnationalism – as a way of organizing and sustaining livelihood, resources and relations of Somali families – is not always emancipating or marginalizing for Somali women. Rather the benefits and challenges of such a way of life for women are different, mixed and uneven.