Calling Family

Digital Technologies and the Making of Transnational Care Collectives

By Tanja Ahlin

SERIES: Medical Anthropology

Rutgers University Press

How do digital technologies shape both how people care for each other and, through that, who they are? With technological innovation is on the rise and increasing migration introducing vast distances between family members--a situation additionally complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the requirements of physical distancing, especially for the most vulnerable – older adults--this is a pertinent question. Through ethnographic fieldwork among families of migrating nurses from Kerala, India, Tanja Ahlin explores how digital technologies shape elder care when adult children and their aging parents live far apart. Coming from a country in which appropriate elder care is closely associated with co-residence, these families tinker with smartphones and social media to establish how care at a distance can and should be done to be considered good. Through the notion of transnational care collectives, Calling Family uncovers the subtle workings of digital technologies on care across countries and continents when being physically together is not feasible. Calling Family provides a better understanding of technological relationality that can only be expected to further intensify in the future.

This book is also freely available online as an open access digital edition. The open access publication was financially supported by the Social Science Research Master and partly also by the Health, Care and the Body Programme Group of the Department of Anthropology, both at the Amsterdam Institute of Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam.

Caring is commonly an exercise in sensitive listening and empathic understanding, with particular attention to all that is not said. This book shows how a scholar can manifest care through their research, and thereby appreciate how carers enact care in their daily lives and their creative deployment of digital technologies in facilitating transnational care. Daniel Miller, coeditor of The Global Smartphone: Beyond a Youth Technology

Calling Family innovatively combines the STS theoretical lens with anthropological sensitivity for social context. Through heartfelt storytelling, the reader is transported from the gardens of Kerala to the deserts of Oman, or takes a car ride across London via webcam. The author teases out the intricate influences of technologies on care and highlights the role of affect for transnational care collectives – the global assemblages of people and digital technologies through which families care at a distance. Loretta Baldassar, coauthor of Families Caring Across Borders: Migrating, Ageing and Transnational Caregiving

Written with great empathy, Calling Family is an extremely timely and original book that explores how everyday digital technologies have become essential for caring relations across distance and how eldercare within such transnational care collectives is transformed.'
Monika Palmberger, coeditor of Care across Distance: Ethnographic Explorations of Aging and Migration

TANJA AHLIN is a post-doctoral researcher and lecturer in the anthropology department at the University of Amsterdam.

Foreword
LENORE MANDERSON

PART I: MAPPING LANDSCAPES

1 Enacting Care

2 Crafting the Field

3 Struggling with Abandonment

PART II: CARING THROUGH TRANSNATIONAL
COLLECTIVES

4 Calling Frequently

5 Shifting Duties

6 Doing Health

Conclusion

Acknowledgments
Appendix: Note on Methodology
Notes
References
Index

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