Entangled Inequalities in Transnational Care Chains


Book Description

Based on a multi-sited ethnographic case study on transnational care chains between Milan (Italy) and Lima, Huancayo, and Cuzco (Peru), the book explores how social inequalities are reproduced through the care practices that follow the introduction of Peruvian migrants into home-based elderly care. Anna Katharina Skornia adopts an innovative approach in combining research on transnational care and migration with a perspective on entangled inequalities. In particular, the study sheds light on the role of state regulations in contributing to these inequalities as well as their ambiguous implications from the perspectives of both caregivers and receivers.




Global Entangled Inequalities


Book Description

This book presents studies from across Latin America to take up the challenge of exploring the plurality of social inequalities from a global perspective. Accordingly, it identifies the structural forces of social inequalities on a world scale as they shape asymmetries observed in a wide array of phenomena, such as racial and gender inequality, urbanization, migration, commodity production, indigenous mobilization, ecological conflicts, and the "new middle class". A rich contribution to the study of the interconnections between the global social structure and multiple local and national hierarchies, Global Entangled Inequalities brings consistently together a variety of conceptual approaches, ranging from ethnographies to legal genealogies, and will therefore appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in social theory, power analysis, intersectionality studies, urban studies, and global social and environmental justice.




Transnational Family Communication


Book Description

This book explores the struggles that immigrant women experience when communicating with their transnational families through information and communication technologies (ICTs). Sondra Cuban recounts the fascinating stories of sixty female immigrants living in Washington state, and explores how gender, social class, nationality, and language influence their ICT usage. She addresses the emotional labor involved in interacting with the families they left behind as well as their ingenious communication systems which challenge the existing research surrounding this unique phenomenon. Early chapters of this book detail the current arguments and theories of transnational family communication in order to propose a new model thereof. Throughout, larger questions of global equality are addressed.




Aging within Transnational Families


Book Description

Transnational families have become a hot topic in migration studies, family sociology and transnational family research. The focus of this literature tend to be working-age migrants and their children in the country of origin. In contrast, older members of transnational families have only sporadically received academic attention. Consequently, rather little is known about the experiences of older people within transnational family contexts as well as about the scope and determinants of their cross-border family ties and practices. Exploring the case of older Peruvians, ‘Aging within Transnational Families’ is one of the first books to provide a multi-method approach to studying aging across borders. It analyzes the complex dynamics of transnational intergenerational solidarity by scrutinizing the willingness and creativity of older Peruvians to support their children and grandchildren across large geographic distances and national boundaries. The book explores the prevalence and structuring features of family-related transnational practices against the backdrop of different migration regimes and shows how policies affect transnational family configurations and the role of older people within them.




The Global Old Age Care Industry


Book Description

This book focuses on the emerging global old age care industry developing as a response to tackle the “old age care crisis” in richer countries. In this global industry, multiple actors are involved in recruiting, skilling and placing migrant care workers in different spheres of the receiving country's old age care system. This book delves into the analysis of these actors and the multiple levels influencing their activities. Accordingly, it examines the significance of old age care regimes and policies as well as intermediaries and promoters for initiating, shaping and perpetuating old age care arrangements based on migrant labor and the relationships within them. Particular emphasis is placed on the risks and implications of these arrangements for the well-being and the social protection of the different actors involved. The book analyzes these processes and structures from a global perspective including different countries and regions of the world.




Anthropological Perspectives on Care


Book Description

In the course of last two decades, the notion of care has become prominent in the social and cultural sciences. As a result of this proliferation of care in several disciplinary fields, we are observing not only the expansion of its conceptual meaning, but also an increasing imprecision in its usage. A growing amount of literature focuses on the intersection between work, gender, ethnicity, affect, and mobility regimes. In view of this growing field of literature, Anthropological Perspectives on Care looks at the notion of care from an anthropological perspective. Complementing earlier approaches, Alber and Drotbohm argue that an interpretation of care in relation to three different concepts, namely work, kinship and the life-course, will facilitate empirical and conceptual distinctions between the different activities that are labeled as care.




The Routledge International Handbook of Transnational Studies


Book Description

The Routledge International Handbook of Transnational Studies offers a comprehensive overview of the dynamic evolution and the most recent debates in this interdisciplinary field. The collection assembles scholarship from the social sciences and the humanities that share a critical perspective extending beyond the nation-state. The contributions investigate sustained connections, events, and activities across state borders and acknowledge prevailing global power asymmetries. The handbook examines the dynamics of transnational processes across seven main themes: epistemological and methodological principles; transnational migrant practices and family remittances; mobilities and (self-)identities; social protection; organizations and social movements; culture, religion, and the arts; and architecture and urban planning. The contributors engage with theoretical developments and analyze empirical cases involving a wide array of critical contemporary topics such as expatriate voting, first- and second-generation return migration, state-sponsored cross-border marriages, access to health care, transnational social work, global religious aesthetics, transnational art corridors, literary translation, remittance-financed architecture, and transnational processes of real estate development and gentrification, among others. They display a series of cross-cutting approaches including postcolonial theory, racism, and gender, and a focus on agency, state policies and macro-structures, and transnational inequalities. This book features multidisciplinary scholars in transnational studies from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, the Philippines, Poland, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This handbook will be of interest to scholars interested in global and transnational perspectives across a wide range of disciplines. It will serve as a key resource for academics, students, and other interested audiences seeking to familiarize themselves with the study of contemporary issues that cross state borders.




The Cultural Context of Aging


Book Description

From the laughing clubs of India and robotic granny minders of Japan to the "Flexsecurity" system of Denmark and the elderscapes of Florida, experts in this collection bring readers cutting-edge and future-focused approaches to our aging population worldwide. In this fourth edition of an award-winning text on the consequences of global aging, a team of expert anthropologists and other social scientists presents the issues and possible solutions as our population over age 60 rises to double that of the year 2000. Chapters describe how the consequences of global aging will influence life in the 21st century in relation to biological limits on the human life span, cultural construction of the life cycle, generational exchange and kinship, makeup of households and community, and attitudes toward disability and death. This completely revised edition includes 20 new chapters covering China, Japan, Denmark, India, West and East Africa, Indonesia, Mexico, Peru, indigenous Amazonia, rural Italy, and the ethnic landscape of the United States. A popular feature is an integrated set of web book chapters listed in the contents, discussed in chapter introductions, and available on the book's web site.




Decolonial Politics in European Peripheries


Book Description

Decolonial Politics in European Peripheries: Redefining Progressiveness, Coloniality and Transition Efforts is a timely contribution to the project of theorizing "Europe" through decolonial perspectives on the Left, as the European and global crisis has prompted new reflections on what it means to sit still at the European "peripheries". The book explores how the joint scholarship efforts of postcolonial and postsocialist scholars might come up with better-grounded and more detailed theoretical and methodological insights into the process of globalization, and subsequent peripheralization, if framed under a progressive and leftist perspective. The authors, many from the South-East Europe region, use a variety of analytical lenses to demonstrate how the nexus of postcolonial, postsocialist area studies and progressive developmental political thought could inspire changes in the future which are in dissonance with neoliberal and neoconservative capitalism. As the side effects of global capitalism continue to accelerate, scholars and activists in the postsocialist periphery are increasingly turning to the concept of decoloniality in the hope it might offer more options on how to begin to build up their framework. This book offers numerous examples of how decolonial theory can be applied to activist work in the fight against austerity and neo-liberalization, as well as examples of how decolonial critique can be mobilized to contest processes of Europeanization and Euro-Atlantic integration. This book will intrigue students and scholars of critical social scholarship in general, postsocialism, postcolonialism, critiques of right populism and the rise of white nationalism in Europe, as well as those studying the regions of South-Eastern Europe and Eurasia more generally. It will also interest activists, organizers, decision-makers, policy analysts, and leftists, both in the region and internationally.




Peruvian Lives across Borders


Book Description

In Peruvian Lives across Borders, M. Cristina Alcalde examines the evolution of belonging and the making of home among middle- and upper-class Peruvians in Peru, the United States, Canada, and Germany. Alcalde draws on interviews, surveys, participant observation, and textual analysis to argue that to belong is to exclude. To that end, transnational Peruvians engage in both subtle and direct policing along the borders of belonging. These acts allow them to claim and maintain the social status they enjoyed in their homeland even as they profess their openness and tolerance. Alcalde details these processes and their origins in Peru's gender, racial, and class hierarchies. As she shows, the idea of return—whether desired or rejected, imagined or physical—spurs constructions of Peruvianness, belonging, and home. Deeply researched and theoretically daring, Peruvian Lives across Borders answers fascinating questions about an understudied group of migrants.