‘More like a daughter than an employee’: the kinning process between migrant care workers, elderly care receivers and their extended families

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the intersections of formal and informal care in the relationships that develop between elderly care receivers and their families and migrant domestic care workers and their families. The domestic migrant care literature has tended to focus on two main ‘hidden costs’ of this ‘care-chain’: the ‘care exploitation’ of paid carers by their employers and the ‘care drain’ impact on the family members left behind by the migrant. In this paper, we employ a care circulation framework to examine the process of becoming kin-like – or ‘kinning’, which remains relatively under-explored and warrants further research. An analysis of this process of kinning helps to highlight how the domestic space of care receiver homes are transformed – through the negotiation of relationships with migrant care workers – into transnational social fields that bring the diaspora worlds of the migrants into the everyday worlds of the locals.

KEYWORDS:

• Transnational migration
• domestic care work
• kinning
• transnational care
• fictive kin

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Due to their active participation in the research process, informants were given the option of using pseudonyms or their real names.