Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to explore how Bulgarian migrant care workers have been organized their mobility and care at home and abroad for over ten years, and to examine how their practices impact on communities left behind, for example, on the intergenerational relationships of care, etc.

Paper long abstract:

Since the 1990s, after the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe, the migration of women throughout this area has grown sharply. From the villages in the Lovech district, northern Bulgaria, where I have carried out fieldwork, a number of women in mid or later life also made the choice to move as single migrants and to work as live-in caregivers or domestic workers mainly in Greece and Italy. Although many of these migrant workers act as their family's main breadwinner, they, mature mothers or sometimes grandmothers, have been simultaneously expected to take on the role of caregivers at home. When these women decided to work abroad, most of them were middle-aged mothers with teenage children, and so they tried to maintain constant communication with their children in Bulgaria by using mobile phones, Skype and Facebook for 'transnational mothering'. Today, about ten years later, they are expected to care for their own old parents or their grandchildren and some of them are wondering whether to return to Bulgaria or not.

Drawing on a long-standing fieldwork in Bulgaria and on short-term fieldwork in Italy, this paper aims to explore how these Bulgarian women have been organized their mobility and care at home and abroad for over ten years. Then, I would like to examine how these new practices impact on communities left behind, especially on their intergenerational relationships of care, gender orders and the notion of 'family' and 'home'.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how inheritance disputes illuminate the nexus of ageing, migration, and care in the central Philippines.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines how inheritance disputes illuminate the nexus of ageing, migration, and care.

For my interlocutors in the central Philippines, land ownership was a recent development. It differentiated the successful middle classes from their class superiors and inferiors. Yet, land’s increased economic value – fuelled by overseas remittances – meant that property exerted considerable pressure on persons and their relations. Amongst siblings, heritable property amplified and created enmities whilst accentuating inequalities and perceived shortcomings.

I foreground a family considered by their peers as exemplary in achieving upward mobility. I highlight how that family’s matriarch foresaw and sought to mitigate an inheritance dispute, and how this was interpreted as an act of care for her adult children. The dispute itself was wound up with care obligations: those who looked after or provided for their elderly parents received the parental house or a bigger share of the land, to the displeasure of their siblings. The dispute was linked too to the children’s own ageing. For migrants, their inheritance claims were saturated by, and interpreted through, considerations of eventual retirement and return, as well as histories of having obtained power within the family, but also enduring demands from parents, siblings, and nieces/nephews.

My account thus illustrates how migration transforms ageing and relations of care; how elderly parents must be seen as both recipients and givers of care; how migrants grapple with their own ageing; and how care has multiple registers, is embedded within various temporalities, and indexes vulnerabilities, capabilities, and inequalities.

Paper short abstract:

The paper explores how in Germany the adult children of care migrants from India are debating how to take care of their ageing parents in a transnational context.

Paper long abstract:

In the 1970s West German hospitals and homes for the elderly recruited nurses from Southern India. Many of these married men from India and founded families in West Germany. Today the nurses and their husbands after an exhausting professional life are nearing retirement age or are already retired. They have to make decisions where to spend their old age and in particular where they have access to sufficient health care and other forms of care. Most of their children are settled in Germany, have founded their own families there and start thinking about how to care for their ageing parents.

The paper is based in particular on participant observation at a weekend workshop for the second generation and their families with the title "When the parents are ageing" and continues long-term ethnographic research on the community of the nurses and their families. It explores how the adult children of the transnational care migrants deal with the consequences of their parents' migration decisions and how they debate their own responsibilities and possibilities for care in a transnational context. It thus analyses how caring about is translated into taking care of, who is given the task of performing care tasks and how the former care givers are expected to behave as care receivers (cf. Fisher and Tronto 1990).

Literature: Fisher, Berenice and Joan Tronto (1990): "Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring" In: Emily K. Abel und Margret K. Nelson (1990) (eds.): Circles of Care. Work and Identity in Women's Lives, Albany: State University of New York, 35-62.

Paper short abstract:

While doing family translocally, caregiving is one of the central ways to maintain and reaffirm family relations. This paper analyses different care cultures, patterns of gendered care, and the challenges of virtual intimacy in a translocal Estonian-Finnish context.

Paper long abstract:

Care is an important factor while making decisions to move or to stay put. Drawing on fieldwork material gathered during 2013-2018 among Estonian families, this paper aims to analyse the understandings and (changing) patterns of care in a translocal Estonian-Finnish context. Having interviewed both family members living or working in Finland, and those staying in Estonia, I present the multiplicity of the ways translocal care affects the everyday life of different family members.

While doing family translocally, caregiving is one of the central ways to maintain and reaffirm family relations. Very often grandparents, especially grandmothers, continue to have an important role in taking care of their grandchildren, either in Finland or in Estonia. The time spend together can, however, be emotionally very loaded and with lot of expectations.

Many families relocating claim they do this to guarantee a better life for their children. However, simultaneously there is often a need to rethink and reorganize the care of elderly relatives in Estonia. While doing this, people have to navigate between two cultures of care (Finnish and Estonian) and the possibly contradictory expectations from different family members in need of care. Some aspects of care can be dealt with from the distance, but some require physical presence of the caregiver, often a woman. Interviewees have claimed that virtual intimacy is not always enough - it entails challenges in conveying emotions and keeping up family relations across the distances, especially when it comes to children and elderly relatives.

Paper short abstract:

Combining insights from transnational anthropology, anthropology of postsocialism, and the narrating identity approach in cultural gerontology, this paper investigates how Russian-speaking migrant women living in Finland account for their ageing.

Paper long abstract:

Combining insights from transnational anthropology, anthropology of postsocialism, and the narrating identity approach in cultural gerontology, this paper investigates how Russian-speaking migrant women living in Finland account for their ageing. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork in an urban-based club for Russian seniors, including written and oral life stories. The research shows that Russian-speaking women have a very strong sense of collective identity that is anchored in master stories of (post)socialism, their transnational life trajectories, and families. First, women's active participation in the club for seniors generates a site of collective identity, which draws on a shared cultural and linguistic background. Their communal workplace identities continue to nourish their ageing in Finland and their participation in the club. Second, women's family positions, in particular as mothers and grandmothers, specifically in transnational families, forms another type of collective, which defines their ageing. Third, in response to migration, women also construct a transnational collective identity, which manifests in the ways they emphasize their relatedness to both Russia and Finland through their family histories. At the same time, ageing is an intensely individual process, and the paper explores how transnational seniors experience their ageing individually yet in dialogue with these collective identities. These findings call for more recognition of transnational, non-Western, and collective-based accounts of ageing to extend the framework of cultural gerontology.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the effects of national educational policies and of EU mobility and labour regimes on the transformations of kin-work, kin-relations and individual life trajectories of the generation of the transnational young-old grandparents, taking the case of Bulgarian Roma ageing carers

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the effects of national policies and of EU mobility and labour regimes on the transformations of kin-work, kin-relations and individual life trajectories of the generation of the transnational young-old grandparents. Drawing on ethnographic material from two Bulgarian Roma communities engaged in intensive labor migration across generations towards several EU countries, I explore the tensions, ruptures and newly emerging strategies to overcome the clash between productive and reproductive labour of the young-old. I argue that the principles of EU freedom of movement, and the more relaxed access to EU labour markets (formally and informally) are in conflict with the static nationally defined educational school policies and regulations. I seek to unpack the hidden connections and unintended consequences that national policies seemingly unrelated to mobility have on mobile people. More specifically, I focus on the effects of national educational policies on the lives of transnational ageing carers My argument is two-fold. First, I demonstrate how national policies affect mobile people in their everyday strategies, decisions to move, intergenerational relations and care arrangement. These policies affect not only children, but also their carers - the grandparents in these transnational families. Second, in many cases the grandparents providing the care have been migrants themselves and were therefore prompted to readjust their future by returning to Bulgaria prematurely. I trace the social and financial challenges that they face by being pressured to simultaneously provide financially as autonomous bread-winners and to be rooted in Bulgaria as caretakers of their school-aged grandchildren.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I build on and further extend Ley and Kobayashi's (2005) concept of 'strategic switching' to the specific context of ageing care. Based on fieldwork in the Azores, I discuss the multiple geographies, subjectivities, and negotiations of health care practices among ageing migrants.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I build on and further extend Ley and Kobayashi's (2005) concept of 'strategic switching' to the specific context of ageing care. Based on fieldwork in the Azores islands - including participant observation and over 100 in-depth life narrative interviews with labour, lifestyle, and return migrants - I deploy the notion of 'strategic switching' to discuss the multiple geographies and subjectivities of health care practices among the three groups of ageing migrants. I examine the complexities of ageing abroad in later-life and explore the ways in which different types of migrants navigate local and transnational systems and take advantage of different places at different stages of the life-cycle. I consider how these migrants strategically maximise the economic and social capital accumulated over the life course, often in one place, to achieve a better life(style) in another. Accounts of health and ageing care among the research participants reveal the ways in which they capitalise their foreignness and/or (trans)local belonging through mobility and transnational practices in order to secure better ageing care. The paper brings interesting nuances to the existing conceptual discussion on 'strategic switching', demonstrating that the concept may encompass multiple geographies, different types of mobility, and diverse strategies for negotiating home in both 'affective' and 'instrumental' ways, according to migrants' needs for health support and care later in life.

Paper short abstract:

Care outsourcing is a new phenomenon of transnational care arrangements. Based on exploratory research we argue that care outsourcing to Poland is an effect of transnational mobilities in articulation with increasing privatization of the care landscape and local projects of future making.

Paper long abstract:

Tensions in many Western European countries around costs and quality of care have resulted in import of migrant carers. In scope much smaller, and less researched, is the phenomenon of not moving the carer, but the person who needs care to a different country where costs are lower. Mobility of the aged thereby ranges from retirement migration (mostly from the European North to European South or within Asia) to care outsourcing (Ormond and Toyota 2016). In Europe, Poland is at the forefront of these kinds of developments not only in sending out many care workers, but also in building care homes that are targeting clients (in particular) from Germany. Terms used in media discussions about this phenomenon range from "grandma deportation", to "geriatric colonialism" and "great business opportunities". Many care homes however still "wait" for Germans to come. Through exploratory research we tried to understand the scope of the phenomenon, and what it becomes in different trajectories of funding. We found two different kinds of care entrepreneurships: transnational corporations and family owned businesses. Both are involved in future making projects, most visibly in the materialities of new or converted care buildings. Based on our preliminary findings, we suggest analyzing care-outsourcing at the intersection of three overlapping angles: 1) the increasing local privatization of the care landscape, including diverse entrepreneurial trajectories; 2) effects from transnational migration among the entrepreneurs, carers, clients and their relatives; 3) projects of future making, including how global corporations attempt to shape local welfare states.