Scaling the ‘Ageing Migrant Body’ in Digital era: A Case of Older Chinese Migrants in Australia During the Covid-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT

Previous research on older migrants’ digital media use has primarily focused on understanding issues related to the ‘digital divide’, ‘transnational capital’, and ‘(im)mobility’. Few studies have investigated how these issues interplay and how they affect older migrants’ construction of selfhood, which informs their modalities of digital engagement. This article will address this gap, by drawing on the concept of ‘geographical scale’, to examine older Chinese migrants’ digital media use and their sense of self and belonging during COVID-19 lockdowns in Melbourne Australia. To achieve this, I analysed 31 interviews, which were collected from two sequential studies conducted in 2020 and 2021. The interview data revealed that older Chinese migrants’ diverse media practices and imaginaries are embedded in and informed by multiple sets of scales of the physical body, the family and domestic realm, the community sphere, and transnational network. It is found that digital media allow participants to navigate, negotiate with and even reconfigure these scales to cope with the challenges of ageing, migration and a global pandemic. However, digital media also produce new scales that differentiate older migrants from the rest of the population to sustain the structural inequality and social unevenness in Australia.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital media
• ageing
• body
• Chinese migrant
• geographical scale
• COVID-19

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 The two studies received Ethic Approval from the University of Melbourne. Approval number #14352 (2020 study) and #22532 (2021 study).

2 The Service Victoria’s contact tracing app was launched in November 2020, and the digital vaccination certificate from myGov was launched in October 2021.

3 Since around the early 2010s, it has been mandatory to open online accounts to access mainstream social services, such as Centrelink and Medicare (via myGov), as well as banking services.