Laura Merla

Aging in place in a mobile world: New media and older people’s support networks

This Focus Topic brings together an analysis of cross-cutting fields of critical importance for the future: aging, migrant transnationalism, and new media. While each of these fields has prompted vast literatures, their intersections remain surprisingly under-acknowledged. Yet, it is at these intersections that a significant social transformation is currently underway that requires attention from researchers, policy makers, and service providers engaging with older populations. It is now common knowledge that population aging is a significant and growing issue for many developed nations around the world, raising important questions about how to best accommodate the needs and opportunities of large numbers of older people, comprising a larger proportion of the population (Ezeh, Bongaarts, & Mberu, 2012; Lutz, Sanderson, & Scherbov, 2008). One common response to this issue by policy makers has been to explore strategies to promote and support “aging in place,” by improving the ability of older people to remain living independently in their own homes and local communities, regardless of age, income, or ability level (Hillcoat-Nalletamby & Ogg, 2014; Vasunilashorn et al., 2012). Studies of aging in place have demonstrated the benefits that can be gained from facilitating people’s engagement in their local neighborhoods and communities, including the prevention of social isolation that might result from reduced physical mobility. This has the advantage of reducing the costs of aged care and fulfilling the goals and aims of many older people to remain in their own homes, especially those living in western countries. However, the emphasis on what services and facilities are required in local neighborhoods or communities to support healthy aging in place tends to overlook the increasing role of migration, mobility, and new media in the lives of older people. It is now clear that more and more people are living “mobile lives” (Elliott & Urry, 2010) as a result of international and intra-national, permanent and temporary forms of migration and movement. Indeed, many of the developed nations that are experiencing population aging also have large – and aging – migrant populations. Aged migrants include both people who arrived in countries of settlement as young adults in the twentieth century as well as those relocating to establish new lives in their retirement in the twenty-first century. For these populations, “aging in place” is not a simple formula. It is not always clear in which “place” older migrants are willing or able to live as they age. While many elderly migrants

Salvadoran Transnational Families, Distance and Eldercare: Understanding Transnational Care Practices in Australia and Belgium

Studies of intergenerational solidarity and family care tend to assume that care-giving requires geographical proximity (Morgan 1975; Joseph und Hallman 1998). This assumption has been challenged by recent research on transnational families that show that migrants and their kin exchange care across borders and that migration does not automatically jeopardize family solidarity (Baldassar et al. 2007; Baldassar 2007; Finch 1989; Zontini und Reynolds 2007; Al-Ali 2002; Izuhara und Shibata 2002; Merla und Baldassar 2010).

Global householding in mixed families: the case of Thai migrant women in Belgium

Although marriage migration is on the rise, the global householding of migrant spouses in ‘mixed’ families remains largely understudied. The present chapter attempts to address this empirical gap by examining gender and intergenerational dynamics in the mixed families of Thai women in Belgium. Using the ‘care circulation’ analytical framework, we identify the way bun khun (a culturally defined sense of obligation to care for one’s natal family members, notably parents) influences Thai women’s global householding. We show that, in order to avoid conjugal conflicts while striving to be ‘dutiful daughters’ to their parents, these women adopt three strategies: accomplishing a traditional reproductive role at home, earning their own livelihood, and tapping their family networks of solidarity.

The social reproductive worlds of migrants

Social reproduction entails physical and socialization processes to ensure ‘the creation and recreation of people as cultural and social, as well as physical human beings’ (Glenn, 1992, p. 4). The production and reproduction through the life-course of people as physical beings incorporates family building through relationship formation and procreation, and the ongoing care required in the maintenance of people on a daily basis involving the physical manual work of ensuring that people are fed, clothed, housed and cared for to the socially expected standards, and the mental and emotional work associated with such endeavours (Laslett & Brenner, 1989). Social reproduction also constitutes people as social and cultural beings, and entails the work of ‘socializing the young, building communities, producing and reproducing the shared meanings, affective dispositions and horizons of value that underpin social cooperation’ (Fraser, 2014, p. 61). Contemporary societies are commonly characterized as facing ‘a crisis of social reproduction’, with its roots, according to Fraser (2014, 2016), lying in the contradiction that while social reproduction is a background condition for the possibility of capitalist production, capitalism accords it no monetized value and treats it as if it were free. In a myriad of ways – including as carers (Parreñas, 2001), cleaners (Anderson, 2000), nurses (Yeates, 2012), handymen (Kilkey, Perrons, Plomien, Hondagneu-Sotelo, & Ramirez, 2013) and brides (Kim & Kilkey, 2017) – ‘rich’ countries have come to rely on migrant labour to alleviate their social reproductive crises. While there is now a large body of scholarship on migrants’ contributions to plugging the social reproductive deficits in migrant-receiving countries, considerably less, although increasing (for example see, Baldassar & Merla, 2014; Erel, 2009; Kofman & Raghuram, 2015), attention has been paid to migrants’ own social reproductive experiences. This is clearly problematic for as Agustín (2003, p. 391) reminds us, ‘[T]o pay attention only to the jobs migrants do is to essentialize them as workers and deny the diversity of their hopes and experiences’. As we have argued elsewhere (Baldassar, Kilkey, Merla, & Wilding, 2018; Kilkey & Urzi, 2017), the relationship between migration and social reproduction from the perspective of migrants themselves is a contradictory one. Thus, on the one hand, migration, often a response to a crisis of social reproduction in the country of origin, may secure better livelihoods, reducing the deficit in the ability of migrants to reproduce their households (Kofman & Raghuram, 2015). This is clearly a factor in the migration flows examined in this special issue, which include those from Central America through Mexico to the USA (Willers), from Latin America to Spain (Oso and Suárez-Grimalt), from Italy to the United Kingdom (Bonizzonni), from Poland to the United Kingdom (Kordasiewicz, Radziwinowiczówna and Kloc-Nowak) and Vietnam to the Czech Republic (Souralova). Collectively, the papers in this special issue demonstrate that ‘[P]eople are not migrating simply for their own benefit, but rather as part of a larger strategy for supporting and caring for their children, parents, spouses and extended kin, and for planning for their future family life’ (Baldassar et al., 2018, p. 431). Simultaneously, however, migration can put at risk other aspects of migrants’ social reproduction as their opportunities to form and reshape their families and households, as well as

Defamilialization of Whom? Re-Thinking Defamilialization in the Light of Global Care Chains and the Transnational Circulation of Care

Defamilialization represented an effective response to the corpus of gender-blind concepts in social policy as it placed women’s interest and their corresponding welfare needs at the forefront. But the concept faces new challenges. First, defamilialization as implemented in European countries relies on important flows of migrant care workers. Still it is not fully accessible to migrant care workers themselves. Second, defamilialization, usually in terms of access to paid work and to public support for care, does not sufficiently take into account the specific situation of migrant workers who continue to assume care responsibilities for geographically distant relatives whose care needs are shaped within highly familialistic regimes of the ‘South’. By crossing the literatures on transnational caregiving and on the emancipating potential of welfare states, this chapter brings forward defamilialization from the side of migrant carers and advocates for a more substantive approach in order to reflect their multi-situated and complex trajectories.

Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme

cogently with the different dimensions of the subject and is convincingly argued. But there are also some weaker points, such as the absence of appropriate or explicit links between the chapters. This creates in the reader an impression that the book is a collection of thematically related but rather independently written essays. Secondly, the book focuses excessively on Belgium, particularly in some chapters. Thirdly, detailed discussion of a number of key issues is lacking. Subcontracting, for example, is mentioned, but is not subjected to detailed analysis in the same way as other aspects of the information society. The book sometimes discusses the relationship between NICT and organisational changes, but at other times seems to take them as read. The same happens in relation to the role of training. Although the authors mention that the acquisition of competences depends on the experience gained when confronted with concrete work situations, rather than on training, they appear at times to stick closely to the official discourse of European institutions, according to which training is the panacea for adaptation to social change.

Gender Mainstreaming in the European Employment Strategy : expert seminar of the European Trade Union Institute and the Institute for Advanced Studies, Brussels, 18-19 May 2000:

more progressive in terms of respect of linked social cohesion and employment incentive among politicians. Moreover, the approach proposed by the academics seems to be out-of-date, particularly after the recent Lisbon Summit. Indeed, Lisbon is often regarded as a turning point in social policy in Europe, as it was decided to link economic progress, full employment and social cohesion together for the first time in a European sphere. Thus, it is striking to see academics proposing old neo-liberal solutions to unemployment while the Lisbon Summit conclusions developed new paths for economic and social policy mixes of social concerns and employment incentives. Emmanuel Mermet