In a new book review at the JCA publisher’s site, Jan-Jan Soon of the School of Economics, Finance & Banking at Universiti Utara Malaysia considers The Labor of Care: Filipina Migrants and Transnational Families in the Digital Age.
Authored by Valerie Francisco-Menchavez and published by the University of Illinois Press in 2018, the book seeks to understand how migrants and their families reciprocate care for each other affectively when separated by thousands of kilometres.
Soon argues that the contributions made by Francisco-Menchavez are in:
developing the multi-directional care model that takes into account different forms and directions of care work, recasting how children left behind actually contribute in caring for their migrant mothers, analysing care work by incorporating the roles of extended/fictive kin and immigrant social networks, and pushing the boundaries of ethnographic research methods through her use of longitudinal multi-sited ethnography and a participatory action research approach to capture the dynamics of care work.