Abstract
With women around the globe increasingly entering the paid labor force, the gender division of labor in households is being reordered. Women in wealthier countries are taking newly opened professional/managerial and service positions, while those in “emerging market economies” are restricted to low-paying or even disappearing agricultural and industrial work, pushing many to migrate and become care workers in rich countries, often leaving their own family members behind. This book focuses on women, migration, and care work in the countries surrounding the Pacific Rim, a global epicenter of transnational migration today. Using a multi-scalar approach that addresses micro, meso, and macro levels, the chapters in this volume examine three domains: care provisioning, the supply of and demand for care work, and the shaping and framing of care. Our analysis reveals that global economic inequalities are now playing out in the most intimate of spaces.
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Notes
- 1.
Consider, for example, the research cluster on Asian Migration at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, led by Brenda Yeoh; and CHAMPSEA, the project for the Study of Transnational Migration in South-East Asia and the Health of Children Left Behind, also at the Asia Research Institute, NUS.
- 2.
Such double-sited fieldwork, which allowed Oliveira to match migrants with family members in Mexico, is unusual. Ironically, while the migration status of her New York City subjects often prevented them from crossing back across the border to visit loved ones in Mexico, Oliveira could travel freely between the two sites and even served as a courier for gifts, messages and photographs between family members kept apart by immigration restrictions.
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Michel, S., Peng, I. (2017). Introduction. In: Michel, S., Peng, I. (eds) Gender, Migration, and the Work of Care. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55086-2_1
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