Ageing, Migration and Digital Care Labour: delivering social science perspectives to aged care
The Anthropological Society of Western Australia is honoured to welcome Professor Loretta Baldassar, Vice Chancellor Professorial Research Fellow, School of Arts and Humanities, Edith Cowan University, for the 2022 Wilson-Locke Lecture.
Members: $10
General Admission: $15
Light supper included with ticket.
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Abstract
“In this talk I consider the contemporary global issues of Ageing, Migration and Technology, and the value of anthropological perspectives in exploring their intersections, particularly in the critical area of aged care. The recent Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Standards reports that, “the state of aged care in Australia diminishes us as a nation”. Among its many recommendations, two are especially relevant to the social sciences: the development of a social supports category and the advancement of technological innovation. However, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), Australia’s primary funding body for health research and innovation, does not list any social science or humanities disciplines in its drop down menu on grant applications – the closest are social psychology and public health. There are also no clearly relevant FOR or SEC codes, reflecting the challenge of delivering social science perspectives within the powerful dominant medical model.
This presentation examines what we can learn from the anthropology of migrant / transnational families and the potential role of new technologies in aged care to improve social support and wellbeing. Any discussion of ageing is quintessentially a migration issue. An increasing amount of formal paid care labour, both in our private homes and in our public institutions, is supplied by migrants. The resultant global care economy has given rise to the dramatic feminisation of labour migration in the form of domestic care workers. Much has been written about the resultant global care chains and the transnational political economy of care. Relatedly, but less visibly, an increasing amount of informal unpaid care labour is provided by temporary visiting family members, and a need to develop a transnational ethics of informal care. This care mobility gives rise to transnational families who inhabit social fields that are constituted and co-created through their reciprocal though uneven care exchanges, which play out over emails, SMS text messages, and social media platforms. So, when we discuss Aged Care policy and practice, we need to discuss migration policy practice, and technology policy and practice as well.
Drawing on the methodological and conceptual frameworks developed in the ARC project: Ageing and New Media, I explore the role of distant and virtual support networks in aging in place, including during pandemic lockdowns. I examine 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. Such conditions require us to consider the importance of human relations to the material world, in particular of forms of digital care labour. Raelene Wilding and I propose the notions of ‘digital kinning’ and ‘digital homeing‘ as ways to theorise the resultant human-technology interactions, and to explore how the rapidly changing polymedia environment is transforming how we communicate, imagine ourselves, and organise our everyday lives, including across distance. For older people in particular, these digital kinning practices often require facilitation by others, emphasising their social relational, intergenerational and performative character. 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 caring, in and across place.”
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Professor Loretta Baldassar is Vice Chancellor Professorial Research Fellow, School of Arts and Humanities, Edith Cowan University. Baldassar is one of Australia’s leading Social Scientists and Internationally recognised leaders in migration studies. In 2020 and 2021 she was named Australian Research Field Leader in Migration Studies (Social Sciences) and in 2021 she was also named Research Field Leader in Ethnic and Cultural Studies (Humanities, Arts and Literature) (The Australian, 8 12 2021). Topping the list in both these fields is an outstanding achievement and constitutes public and academic recognition of her important research.