Chan, Henry Hin‐yan;
(2023)
Reworking of care during workday outings: On migrant domestic workers' everyday negotiation of migration infrastructure in the global city of Hong Kong.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
10.1111/tran.12611.
(In press).
Preview |
Text
Trans Inst British Geog - 2023 - Chan - Reworking of care during workday outings On migrant domestic workers everyday.pdf - Published Version Download (1MB) | Preview |
Abstract
This paper examines care as a contested bio-political arena defining the daily lives of live-in domestic care migrants in Hong Kong. It asks what roles migration infrastructures and mundane city landscapes play in mediating associated everyday care dynamics. Empirically, it examines two sets of care-related infrastructures in the city that intimately mediate the population's everyday experience of care. The paper first examines the ways the regulatory infrastructures of the city state, whose operational logics are aligned with the production of 'permanent temporariness' and disposability, systematically deny migrants' access to institutional care for themselves. Second, the papers examine the ways care migrants improvise with the city's situational urban geographies and their human bodies as infrastructure resources during regular work-bound urban outings to elaborate provisional, localised and informal care infrastructures. While not without challenges, these improvised informal care infrastructures essentially allow the migrant care-labor population to live with their institu-tionalised precarity. Overall, the paper makes three contributions. First, it reconceptualises live-in domestic care migrants as urban actors capable of both navigating and crafting their own care infrastructures in the city, even during workdays. Second, it foregrounds 'care' as an urban and socio-technical construct in relation to both bio-political control and interpersonal coping. Third, it employs the ideas of precarity, provisionality and robustness to unpack the bio-political systems that shape migrants' experiences of care. The findings are based on an analysis of the city's migration regulations and the actual urban work-life stories of a small group of live-in domestic care migrants based on participants' personal diaries and interviews with the participants.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Reworking of care during workday outings: On migrant domestic workers' everyday negotiation of migration infrastructure in the global city of Hong Kong |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1111/tran.12611 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12611 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). © 2023 The Authors. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers). This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. |
| Keywords: | care infrastructure, diary-interview method, Hong Kong, migrant domestic workers, migration infrastructure, neighbourhood |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Geography |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10168101 |
Archive Staff Only
 |
View Item |
