Childcare Workers, Global Migration and Digital Media

Youna Kim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351606660
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Minderheitenstudien

This book explores the transnational mobility, everyday life and digital media use of childcare workers living and working abroad. Focusing specifically on Filipina, Indonesian, and Sri Lankan nannies in Europe, it offers insights as to the causes and implications of women's mobility, using data drawn from ethnographic research examining transnational migration, work experiences, family, and relationships. While drawing attention to the hidden, largely invisible and marginalized lives of these women, this research reveals the ways in which digital media, especially the use of mobile phones and the Internet, empower them but also continue to reinforce existing power relations and inequalities. Drawing on a wide range of perspectives from media and communications, sociology, cultural studies and anthropology, the book combines theoretical perspectives with grounded case studies.

1 Minorities and the Digital Media

Feminization of migration has emerged as a common livelihood strategy to alleviate poverty and improve socio-economic, cultural, and familial conditions. Low-income female migrants have little choice about whether or not they live with their families, where they work, and where they call home (Silvey, 2006). Global mobility seems the best livelihood option and the only way to earn an income for the deprived and desperate. Increasingly often, women are on the move as never before in history. Millions of women from poor countries in the global South migrate to do the women’s work of the global North—female traditional care work that affluent women are no longer able or willing to do and many men either cannot or will not do (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2002). This global relationship mirrors the traditional relationship between the sexes; in the absence of help from their male partners, affluent women have moved into the labor market by turning over the care of children to women from the global South. In addition to childcare, nannies are engaged in other domestic work such as cleaning, cooking, ironing, or dog-walking, when requested by their employers in the flexible and contingent processes of domestic labor. In practice, boundaries between care activities and domestic services are often blurred; nannies are expected to embody a fictitious, ideal housewife providing coordination of the home. Global cities such as Paris and New York are home to global nannies and a proliferation of “the professional household without a wife” constituted by this new type of “serving class” (Sassen, 2009b). A stroll through any Paris neighborhood will bear out a visible trend that more and more foreign-born women are pushing baby strollers (New York Times, 2010). This care work is disproportionately performed by foreign workers of racialized groups as “global servants of global capitalism” (Parrenas, 2001), not only because their labor is cheaper but also because they are poor and compelled to be more deferent and servile (Mozère, 2004). To omit this particular caring function of domestic labor, then, is to ignore the divisions of race and class in reproductive work (Anderson, 2000), the potential slavery and the relative disempowerment as the reproduction of racial stereotypes, widening class differences and social inequalities in global cities.

There are between 50 and 100 million domestic workers worldwide (ILO, 2011). It is hard to pin down the exact numbers, since so much of the servant economy is underground, undocumented, and unregulated, and since this care work operates inside the private sphere of the home, where more potential for exploitation exists, often without formal labor contracts. Some of the world’s largest flows of undocumented, temporary migrant workers originate in Asia. In three Asian countries, namely the Philippines, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka, women are the majority of migrant workers (Campbell, 2006) and have constituted between 60% and 80% of labor migrants since the 1980s (Anggraeni, 2006; Moukarbel, 2009; Parrenas, 2010; Ukwatta, 2010). Approximately 10 million Filipinas, 1.5 million Indonesians, and 1 million Sri Lankans work abroad in the domestic care sector, emerging as some of the largest groups of migrant laborers in the global economy. Asian female migrant workers are very mobile like tourists, becoming global nomads who have labored in multiple countries. Many Asian nannies in Paris worked previously in other countries of Asia or the Middle East (e.g., Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia) before coming to Paris to care for the children of the French or of European and American expatriates in Paris. Some of these Asian nannies in Paris, who started to arrive in the 1980s, are the runaways fleeing abusive employers when their employers, usually from the Middle East, vacationed in France (Fresnoza-Flot, 2009). Many others enter through tourist visas and then overstay the permitted period to remain in invisible employment inside private households. French immigration policies do not issue work permits for domestic care service and do not acknowledge it as a sector of employment for migrants, thereby leaving the status of legal employment to the discretion of employers (Briones, 2008; Scrinzi, 2011). However, many employers do not register their employees, further ensuing that forms of exploitation in relation to working conditions and wages remain largely hidden, ultimately with more power and control over their employees. The proportion of illegal migrants (sans-papiers) in the domestic care sector appears remarkably high (over 80%); they are among the most exploited and least protected groups of migrants (Fresnoza-Flot, 2009; Kontos, 2009). Both legal and illegal recruitment agencies, as well as informal social networks created by earlier migration of family members and friends and the use of mobile communication technologies, increasingly facilitate the flows of undocumented, irregular migrants who continue to move and struggle with multiple mobilities in search of work and stability. Importantly, digital media, mobile phones and the Internet in particular enable migrants to be simultaneously mobile and connected, anytime and anywhere. The widespread use of digital media, as an integral resource of everyday life, is leading to new practices and complex consequences in the mobile lives of minorities.

Can digital media help minorities improve their life conditions? How much is this connectivity by new technologies creating a sense of empowerment, contributing toward greater freedom and equality? Does it produce new spaces for intimacy in family life? To what extent is digital media use felt to be of value in extending a sense of self and social relationships? How does it construct feelings of home and belonging in the transnational lives of minorities, and what are the consequences for identity formation? Based on long-term ethnographic research on global nannies in Paris, this book explores how digital media affect the mobile lives of minorities in their complexity and paradox within major arenas of use in everyday life. While drawing attention to the hidden, largely invisible, marginalized minorities, this research reveals the ways in which digital media, especially mobile phones and the Internet, make differences in their lives but also continue to reinforce existing power relations and inequalities well beyond their control in various contexts of use. The core issue guiding this research revolves around the concern with power. Recognizing the significance of new technologies and mobile cultures within the existing social structures, this book argues for the double capacity of digital media use with both enabling and disabling consequences that are mediated by profoundly asymmetrical power relations in the everyday contexts of interaction. The multifaceted ways minorities use digital media technologies in everyday life are a reflection and articulation of the enduring structures and forces that shape their lives and social positioning in the ongoing struggle as marginalized subjects. Global nannies in Paris—widely traveled Filipina, Indonesian, and Sri Lankan nannies in a cosmopolitan center of Europe that appears to manifest a public embrace of cultural diversity and multiculturalism—are taken as empirical case studies to critically assess the complex and sometimes contradictory capacity and meaning of the digital media in the extremely imposing structural and material constraints on its invisible users.

Global nannies make up some of the most socially marginalized, exploited, and vulnerable minorities in the world today (for details, see Chapter 2). Their work is frequently unrecognized, isolated, and hidden behind closed doors in private homes, while their voices are usually silenced. Inattention to the hidden women’s work and silences neglects their important contributions to an integral part of the economy, well-being, and social life of the larger interdependent world, both sending and receiving countries. When used in its statistical sense, the term “minorities” conveniently refers to subjects that are small in number (e.g., people of color) less than the majority (e.g., white), but this convenient umbrella label misleads those using the label to think of minorities as small not only in number but also in importance (Wilson et al., 2013). Silences and omissions as a tendency of analytical frameworks are a source of concern in light of the task of chronicling minorities of particular social groups already prone to invisibility (Burrell, 2012) and are bound up in global power relations and the marginalization that dominant narrations effect for particular subjects and histories (Hemmings, 2011). Minorities’ position as marginal refers to the kaleidoscope of real and perceived circumstances that cause them to feel disadvantaged or disempowered (Powell, 2014). Minorities can be disadvantaged in their actual life conditions but not always feel that way, as certain power resources can be imagined and appropriated.

Some of the resources by which minorities, global nannies in this case, manage mobility and attempt to make themselves feel empowered—albeit temporary, fleeting yet routinized in everyday practices—are digital media such as mobile phones and the Internet. All nannies in this study have mobile phones, and more than half connect to the Internet through their mobile phones more than they do through computers, which are relatively expensive and cumbersome in the lives of global nomads. The mundane and pervasive use of an individualized portable device, like the mobile phone with Internet-enabled multimedia and mobile communications anytime and anywhere, entails consideration of new narratives of mobility and belonging, ritual practices, human existence and modes of being in the world. Its perceived role is so crucial that the absence or loss of the device can feel like a loss of life and self, a loss of connection to significant others and of the expression of love, a loss of core and potential relationships with their own spaces of flows. Given the centrality of the intimate technological presence that embodies social and emotional life, the issue here is not merely about physical access to technological resources (e.g., the traditional digital divide between the haves and the have-nots, and hence digital exclusion), but it requires a nuanced and critical understanding of the users’ relational access to digital media technologies and how they actually experience that access in everyday relational contexts of use that are not disconnected from but enmeshed with power dynamics. Multiple modes of power can be appropriated to deal with labor status, social alienation, insecurity, and anxiety about highly precarious lives as racialized, classed, and gendered minorities at the margins of multicultural society. Their everyday life, particularly under work conditions of isolation, exploitation, material poverty, and emotional imprisonment, renders them vulnerable and disempowered, while making their engagement with digital media even more significant and more central to everyday life and ongoing struggle for survival and development. One of the greatest hardships endured by the poor is a sense of isolation, and new communication technologies are expected to reduce that feeling and allow people connect to a wider world in ways unimaginable before (Wheeler, 2010). New communication technologies are of value to low-income people in the conditions of poverty and become integral to their well-being, relationships with other people, and sense of self (Horst and Miller, 2006). The construction of self and identity takes place in a context marked by the multiple and intersecting axes of power and inequality that operate simultaneously in a digitally connected world and within which everyday life is embedded. Women of minority groups are positioned in serialized structures of gender, race, and class, which do not determine identities among them but produce similarly positioned experiences and intersecting voices that have affinity with one another and similar perspectives of other social positions and events (Young, 1997). For the minorities, the formation of identity can be imagined as a particular organization of social and material forces of marginal power in the real world. It is a space of power, nonetheless, made not only of victims but also of actors producing their own meanings (Hall, 1991).

This book will importantly recognize and analyze how power relations and structures shape digital media cultures in everyday contexts. New digital technologies do not radically create new conditions or change power relations already in existence. Rather, they are created by existing social and cultural contexts that are diverse and stratified (Everett, 2008). New technologies arise from the existing patterns of hierarchy in relation to class, race, gender, and so on, while they also enable new practices to open up new spaces of identity politics (Poster, 2001). To whom will technologies give greater power and freedom, and whose power and freedom will be reduced by them (Postman, 1992)? It is indicated that the gap between Internet users and non-users is no longer associated with race and gender (Rice and Katz, 2003) and that racial minorities and disadvantaged groups in multicultural societies are more likely to access, or show greater motivation to use, digital media technologies to compensate for their lack of social capital and power (Gustavo, 2012; Library Technology Reports, 2012). The growing numbers of working-class, specifically low-income, migrants utilizing networks indicate that the Internet and mobile communications are being transformed from an elite privilege for the upper classes into basic instruments necessary for human existence, as these technologies are becoming more widespread and more closely integrated with the lives of all people (Qiu, 2009). However, this transformation in increased levels of technological access does not necessarily reduce socio-economic inequality but makes it more explicit by supporting the power and interests of the wealthy more than helping the poor. In this relational context, the abilities of the poor and the disadvantaged to experience access and make deliberate choices or feel a sense of empowerment are not completely separate from, but also conditioned by and reconfigured in relation to, the privileged others in power. Mobile digital technologies can intensify, rather than bridge, differences between the powerful and the disadvantaged by reinforcing the continuity of traditional power structures and enduring patterns of communication, or by producing potential new inequalities (Van Dijk, 2012). To realize the dreams and promises of the digital media to empower all users, then there is a need to challenge that context of socio-economic inequality and asymmetrical power (Curran et al., 2012).

As this book will demonstrate, although new technologies are seen as offering potential for good life and societal improvement and can supposedly empower the marginalized to claim a space in relation to self-identity, community, home, and belonging, these great expectations are not always easily met in the lived experiences of racialized, classed, and gendered minorities. In a technological age, people’s ruling ideal of good life—quality of life constituted by dimensions of personal freedom and choice, well-being, leisure, intimacy, and happiness—seems to be inextricably bound up with technology and the means it offers to control the external world (Brey et al., 2012). Freedom is a process of becoming, of being able to see and understand difference within unity, and resisting the tendency to reproduce the hierarchies and inequalities embedded in the world (Davis, 2012), or fundamentally calling things into question and revolting, not changing or succeeding (Kristeva, 2002). Liberal discourses of technology and unbridled freedom in a utopian form of futurology tend to obscure hierarchical social structures and identify freedom merely with free enterprise or celebrate autonomous subjects freed from traditional constraints, thereby wittingly or unwittingly masking the fundamental issue of freedom and inequality. In a sense, mobile phones and the Internet are a sublime set of technologies expressing a mythology, a belief in what could take place, rather than realized achievements (Mosco, 2004). What is commonly considered a liberating new technology today and its assumed transformative feature, such as the always-on connectivity of mobile digital devices, promises to empower users to have more choice or enhance human freedom, facilitating larger and more diverse networks and hence social and economic development (Rainie and Wellman, 2012), but it can also diminish individual freedom and even lead to enslaving conditions under the force of social influences in a world based on connectivity. It is thus important to give simultaneous recognition to the centrality of individual freedom and to the force of social influences on the extent and reach of individual freedom. Expansion of freedom is both the primary end and the principal means of development (Sen, 1999). In other words, development is a process of expanding the overall freedoms of people to lead the kind of lives they have reason to value and to enhance the real choices they have in all spheres of life. Development consists of the removal of various types of unfreedoms that leave people with little choice and little opportunity of exercising their reasoned agency. The innate characteristics of digital media are often seen to be able to provide new possibilities for freedom of choice in the conduct of everyday life, and the presumption is that those choices, freely made and enhanced by such technological access, will lead, individually and collectively, to a more satisfying and productive existence and enhanced quality of life (Silverstone, 2005). The perpetual connectivity and mobility with which mobile phones and the Internet impact the mobile lives of minorities is a useful case for critically understanding such technological capacity for freedom and development in everyday life.

Based on ethnographic research on the lives and experiences of global nannies in Paris, this book considers the mundane, banal yet profound presence of digital media in everyday life; in the multifaceted contexts of work life, power and freedom (Chapter 3), family life and intimacy (Chapter 4), particularly mother-daughter relationships (Chapter 5), personal life, leisure and the self (Chapter 6), social relationships, belonging and identity in multicultural society (Chapter 7), and finally, reflections on what this digital experience means in a world of cosmopolitan humanity (Chapter 8). Like all previous technologies, the potentials of the digital media are context dependent, not determined by the technologies in their own right, and the consequences of technological benefits are mediated by structural power relations and the social positioning of users. This book moves beyond the assumed power of technological determinism in the lives of users, but it moves closer to the users’ relational, situational, embodied experiences of being digital. It reveals that the use of digital media as integrative resources is embedded in, and functions together with, other structures of oppression to shape the very nature of what it means to be human, of human relations, the possibilities of social interaction, lived experiences, and identities of minorities. Far from freeing the minorities, social constraints and marginalization on the basis of race, class, and gender or a similar affiliative structure can also be reproduced in new digital cultural realms and thus sustain, rather than transcend, social and cultural divisions, intersecting forms of identity marker and interwoven inequalities so prevalent in social worlds. Paradoxically, boundaries of exclusion and inclusion for a feeling of belonging can be marked out, drawn and redrawn, and reinforced through the everyday practices of digital media use and ongoing processes of differentiation in identity construction. Although digital media use by minorities is indeed increasing, this is not in itself reason to be optimistic about technology’s ability to empower minorities, as technological worlds create cultural difference, inequality, and dominant values of social worlds in the webs of worldly and materialized power (Bauchspies et al., 2006; Nakamura, 2008). This book uncovers how racialized, classed, and gendered minorities such as global nannies deal with the hierarchical formations of cultural difference and how they attempt to expand their sense of self and the very small social world they physically inhabit as this world intersects with the complex and indeterminate world of digital media that goes beyond utopian technological determinism and becomes an ordinary and integral constituent of everyday life.

From Digital Utopia to the Everyday

Digitalization of everyday life, the micro-coordination of the everyday through mobile digital technologies, becomes a routine part of contemporary experience, with high levels of access to mobile phones and online communications. Anecdotally, at least those in the West appear to be fully immersed in all things digital and ubiquitous media cultures (Hand, 2008). The term “digital” media in general refers to the new media that incorporate interactive, two-way communications—and to some extent performative aspects of communications—and involve some form of computing as opposed to the previous technologies such as radio and television (Manovich, 2001; Jensen, 2010; Logan, 2010). Digital media forms are re-mediating the familiar (Bolter and Grusin, 1999), re-purposing or hybridizing all existing and highly developed media forms of communications, and the shift of focus within digital media to individualized networked practices and greater use of mobile technologies lead to new preoccupations (Dewdney and Ride, 2014). Fluid, individualized connectivity and freedom characterize these new technologies that do not render all other forms of the media obsolete (Chun and Keenan, 2006). An important driving force in the development of digital media is the goal of total connectivity—the ability to access all, in all places, at all times—increasingly afforded by mobile phones and other portable web-access devices (Messaris and Humphreys, 2006). The mobile phone moves to the center stage as a device crisscrossed by media flows, cultural forms and content, borrowing and cross-fertilizing from audio and radio cultures, television cultures, print cultures, Internet, and other emerging media cultures (Goggin, 2006). The role of the mobile phone is rapidly developing since the late 1990s (Glotz et al., 2005), and Internet use as an everyday phenomenon expanded from the mid-1990s onward, and mobile Internet users are projected to surpass desktop Internet users (Castells, 2013). Moreover, the spectacular growth of social media from 2004 onward is expected to profoundly change social relations and communications. There is a tendency to attribute the word “mobile” to digital devices, with a subsequent tendency to expect a cultural shift along with this technological transformation when a geographically fixed medium becomes mobile (Farman, 2012).

Historically, digital media have given rise to utopian and dystopian perspectives and the elevated hopes and fears associated with them (Jensen, 2010). The celebration of the transformative potential of digital technologies is a dominant discourse in which the rise of digital utopianism and particular utopian visions loom large. It is argued that being digital does give much cause for optimism with very powerful qualities—de-centralizing, globalizing, harmonizing, and empowering—that will result in its ultimate triumph (Negroponte, 1995). According to this optimistic argument, traditional centralist views of life will become a thing of the past, and digital technologies can be a natur...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Minorities and the Digital Media
• 2 Global Nannies: A Global-Historical Perspective
• 3 Mobile Phone for Empowerment? Work Life, Power and Freedom
• 4 Digital Media for Intimacy? Family Life and Transnational Mothering
• 5 Digital Media and Intergenerational Migration
• 6 The Care of the Self: “As a Woman, Not as a Mother or a Nanny”
• 7 Racism, Ethnic Media, and Home
• 8 Cosmopolitan Hospitality
• Bibliography
• Index