Why a Symposium on Care Migration and Care Marketization?

Over the past decades, the demand for care and care work has been escalating globally. In the past, they have had not received public acknowledgment comparable to its importance as a subject of fundamental necessity.  However, increasing care gaps and crises as well as the emerging care business let the topic move upwards on the societal and scientific agenda.

Pointedly, in the face of fiscal pressures, culminated in the Global Financial Crisis from 2008-2012, governments in classic welfare states in the Global North have significantly withdrawn from the institutional provision of care, while states with traditionally low welfare provision (e.g., USA and many Middle Eastern, Asian and African countries) have continued to maintain their welfare policy. Women’s increasing workforce participation and population ageing have also significantly contributed to the escalating demand for care and care work. Ongoing poverty and economic crises in many countries have led to the availability and recruitability of primarily female migrants as live-in workers and carers in the private households of the middle and upper classes around the globe. 

As a consequence, a lucrative global market for care and care work has been emerged, a particular kind of market which is like no other, given the intimate and personalized nature of the product sold/bought. The emergence of this global care market goes along with new modes of care provision. Migrant women, largely from developing and from the former communist countries, have, therefore, come to increasingly fill the care gaps in developed and/or more affluent countries and there are new modes of care provision built up on a kind of triple mobility: the transnational investment of capital in the care sector, migrant work and mobile clients and consumers of care services.

Global marketization of care and work and global care migrations share many commonalities; yet at the same time, they are multifarious and complex. Subject to intensive marketization, different care migrations are embedded in different socio-spatial and historical settings in the geopolitical framings of Global North and Global South, West and East. They are both extensive and multi-scaling, articulating the diverse arrangements of care and care work along lines, such as gender, class, ethnicity and immigration policies. Different care migrations cannot be enframed in a single, generalized analysis; but they call for a differentiated and contextualized investigation, where each case represents an instructive example of care migrations under the auspices of the commodification of care and labour and the marketization of care services.

Invitation to Reflect on Care Migration and Care Marketization 

The international symposium is the concluding conference of the research project „‘Ideal‘ Migrant Subjects: Domestic Service in Globalization“ embedded in the research focus on care and care work in the Department for the Theory of Society and Social Analyses at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. It strives to bring together experts in this research field, to increase and intensify the exchange between researchers investigating care migration and marketization in different parts of the world and to discuss differences, commonalities and similarities in new modes of domestic service provision.

Co-organizers/Co-chairs
Brigitte Aulenbacher
Wasana Handapangoda

Conference Assistant
Rebecca Gruber

Administration
Tobias Eder