Full Description
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.
Contents
1. Minorities and the Digital Media
1.1 From Digital Utopia to the Everyday
1.2 Digital Media and Everyday Life
1.3 Documenting the Undocumented
2. Global Nannies: A Global-Historical Perspective
2.1 Feminization of Migration: Nannies from the Global South
2.2 Why Women Move: Development as Freedom
2.3 Remittances for Development: Philippines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka
2.4 New Nannies of Europe
2.5 Paris: The Other Side of the Global City
3. Mobile Phone for Empowerment?: Work Life, Power and Freedom
3.1 Mobile Phone as Social Capital
3.2 Disposable Life
3.3 Mobile Connection, Disempowerment and Inequality
4. Digital Media for Intimacy?: Family Life and Transnational Mothering
4.1 Intensive Mothering: Gender Inequality Unchanged
4.2 Intimacy and Digital Fatigue
4.3 Morality of Mothering
5. Digital Media and Intergenerational Migration
5.1 Mediated Migration: "Paris is Beautiful"
5.2 Digital Media in an Emotional Sphere
5.3 Self-Expression Online: "I am Doing Nothing"
6. The Care of the Self: "As a Woman, Not as a Mother or a Nanny"
6.1 Self-Sacrifice: Money, Time, Leisure
6.2 Not Part of the Family
6.3 Gossip Community, Sexuality and Erotic Capital
6.4 Digital Media as Affective Practice: "Doing Things Together"
7. Racism, Ethnic Media and Home
7.1 Banal Racism in Everyday Life
7.2 Ethnic Media, Ethnic Enclave
7.3 Home Always There: "I'm Not Going to Stay Here Forever"
8. Cosmopolitan Hospitality
8.1 Whose Cosmopolitanism?
8.2 Hospitality as an Urgent Response
