Migration, Care and Intersecting Inequalities
Interdisciplinary Symposium
Tuesday 4th June 2024, 10 am – 5 pm, University of Reading, UK
This interdisciplinary symposium aims to explore the relationship between migration, care and intersecting inequalities within the post-pandemic geopolitical landscape of immobility regimes, crisis-driven displacement, care deficits and ageing populations. The symposium will reflect on how paid and unpaid caring arrangements are shaped by intersecting inequalities in diverse migration and transnational contexts. Paper and plenaries address issues of caring practices across the lifecourse, intersectionality and inequalities in access to formal care and social protection globally. These highly politicised and emotive issues pose key challenges and dilemmas for policymakers, practitioners and family members, as well as researchers and academics interested in transnational migration, care and social protection.
The Symposium will include a hybrid keynote and plenary (free online access):
10.15-11.30am Transnational ageing: theorising digital kinning and the relationality of care: Keynote lecture by Professor Loretta Baldassar, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia (hybrid – online access available)
Abstract: Drawing on ethnographic case studies of older migrant family and support networks, the first part of the paper explores the way today’s polymedia environments have created the conditions for synchronous, continuous, multisensory co-presence across distance that challenge the normative and ontological privileging of proximity in care and kinship relationships. In the second part of the paper, I share Raelene Wilding and my concept of ‘digital kinning’ as a way to theorise the resultant forms of digital aged-care labour. The concept of kinning (Howell 2013) highlights the processes of becoming kin, not on the basis of biological ties, but on the basis of what is done, performed and exchanged. For older people, these digital kinning practices often require facilitation by others, emphasising their social relational, intergenerational and performative character. Although essential to the wellbeing of older adults, distant support networks and the digital kinning practices that sustain them receive little attention from policy makers and aged care health practitioners. It is in the creative and diverse practices at the intersections of mobilities and materialities that we see how technologies can transform the experience of ageing and caregiving in and across place.
Loretta Baldassar is Professor of Anthropology and Sociology, Vice Chancellor’s Professorial Research Fellow, and Director of the Social Ageing (SAGE) Futures Lab at Edith Cowan University (ECU) in Perth, Western Australia. Baldassar was recently named Australian Research Field Leader in Migration Studies and in Ethnic and Cultural Studies. She is lead Chief Investigator on a Medical Research Future Fund Dementia and Migrant Communities project; social support stream lead on the National Frailty Kit project, and co-Chief Investigator of the Youth Mobilities project. Her work is widely acknowledged as foundational to the field of Transnational Family Studies, including her most recent book, Transnational Families in Africa (with Marchetti-Mercer & Swartz, 2023). She has also published extensively on ageing across the life course, social care and the role of social support networks to support wellbeing, cultural safety, digital ageing, intergenerational relations, and co-design of social interventions for CaLD communities.
2.00-3.30pm Intergenerational Care, Inequalities and Wellbeing among Transnational Families in Europe: Plenary presenting key findings of the ‘Transnational Families in Europe research project, led by Professor Ruth Evans, University of Reading and Dr. Rosa Mas Giralt, University of Leeds. The presentation will be followed by a panel discussion with leading academics, practitioners and policymakers (hybrid – online access available).
Papers (to be presented in person) address the following themes:
- ‘Proximate’ and ‘distant’ intergenerational care in transnational families
- Paid and unpaid care and intersecting social differences and inequalities (gender, race, ethnicity, disability/ chronic illness, ageing, socio-economic status, legal status, multilingualism, education and so on)
- Children’s and young people’s caring responsibilities in diverse migration contexts
- (Im-)mobility and care regimes and differential welfare entitlements and rights
- Methodological and ethical approaches to researching caring relations, migrant/transnational family lives and inequalities
Download Symposium final programme
Further information
Contact: Ruth Evans: r.evans@reading.ac.uk
The Symposium forms part of the dissemination activities of the research project, Care, Inequality and Wellbeing in Transnational Families in Europe: a comparative, intergenerational study in Spain, France, Sweden and UK (2021-2024), led by Professor Ruth Evans, University of Reading and Dr. Rosa Mas Giralt, University of Leeds, UK. It is funded by the UK Research and Innovation – Economic and Social Research Council and Joint Programming Initiative ‘More Years Better Lives’ (UKRI ESRC, Agencia Estatal de Investigación, Spain, Agence Nationale de la Recherche, France and FORTE, Sweden).
