Co-hosted by Rachel Murphy, Chigusa Yamaura, and Katya Hertog (Gender and Care hub, Global and Area Studies, Asian Studies Centre, and Oxford Internet Institute).
Abstract
A seeming contradiction in terms, remote eldercare is an emerging industry where workers in the Philippines monitor and interact with elderly United States-based clients, via a computer tablet and mediated by an avatar of an animated dog or cat. Using remote eldercare as a case study, I examine how internet and communications technologies (ICTs) reconfigure an international division of reproductive labour by engendering extraction of Southeast Asian workers’ intimate labour to sustain the lives of people in the Global North, this time without migration. In addition to labour time, I build on Neferti Tadiar’s concept of “remaindered lives” to frame remote carework as the transnational commodification of the vitality and life-times of careworkers. Through their situated testimonies and cultural production, I theorize how remote careworkers use ICTs to assert the materiality and affective complexity of their labour, and ultimately to craft modes of life-making that defy capitalist capture.
