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Paper short abstract

Reflecting on fieldwork with Filipino and Sri Lankan migrant women in Bucharest, this paper explores care as persistent tinkering adapting to time scarcity, vulnerabilities, and precarity while questioning reciprocity, positionality, and the limits of ethnographic responsibility.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on ongoing doctoral fieldwork with Filipino and Sri Lankan migrant women in Bucharest, Romania, this paper reflects on conducting research at the intersection of medical vulnerability and migration precarity. My interlocutors are embedded in what Parreñas (2001) terms the „international division of reproductive labor”, women caught in global care economies who often lack access to care themselves. Working with women who labor six days a week under extended hours, I have had to adapt my methods to rhythms that leave little space for sustained engagement in the classical Malinowskian style. Reaching discussions of healthcare proves especially challenging, as every encounter requires ongoing adjustment and attunement to both particular and structural vulnerabilities, as well as to specific cultural frameworks of health. When I take their limited free time, I cannot escape the sense that I am extracting their scarce resource for my own ends, colonizing hours they might otherwise rest, call family, or simply breathe. Yet care generates ambiguity. Though I am neither a healthcare practitioner nor a service provider, some interlocutors perceive me as a resource, a „native” in their host country.

These dynamics raise critical questions: What are the limits of care when conducting such research? Can research that depends on such extraction truly serve those it studies? How do we remain accountable when collaboration is neither formalized nor symmetrical?

This paper argues that care, while essential, is never neutral. It must be continuously interrogated as both methodological commitment and site of unequal exchange and expectations.