A new article by the Hub's Rachel Murphy (with Gaohui Wu) entitled “Why Do Rural Migrant Mothers in China Digitally Monitor Their Children?” has just been published in the leading journal Gender and Society.
The article draws on 22 interviews with migrant mothers of children aged 7-14 years conducted as a part of a wider project funded by John Fell Fund for which Rachel Murphy is PI: “Digitally Visibilized Life-making in Migrant Families in China,” award number 0013756. The article explores how and why some rural intra-provincial working migrant women in cities in central China used digital monitoring in their mothering. It shows how intersectionally constituted time pressures arose from these women’s need to balance their responsibilities in paid work and childcare. A subset of the mothers used home security cameras and smartwatches to pursue three core aspects of intensive mothering: being continually accessible to their children, supervising their children’s safety and well-being, and encouraging their children to study. By means of digital monitoring the mothers tried to make their time at their places of paid work stretch to also cover meeting their responsibilities in their domestic worlds, practices we call “maternal time-stretching”. The conclusion reflects on the implications of these women’s digital time-stretching efforts for feminist theories of mothering and care.
