ABSTRACT 

Host to a million migrant workers including around 250,000 migrant domestic workers, Singapore’s urban social exclusion of low-waged migrant workers was a pre-pandemic faultline which was exacerbated as Covid-19 peaked, exposing migrant workers to greater health and social risks than the average Singaporean. As pandemic conditions led to intensified surveillance and decreased mobility, many migrant domestic workers had to forego visits back to their home countries, endure confinement to their employers’ home, and in some cases, had their day off privileges withdrawn. This talk draws upon findings from 55 qualitative interviews with migrant domestic workers (MDWs) based in Singapore around themes surrounding their migration, food security, and carework. A transnational lens is employed to look not just at MDWs’ own experiences around securing access to food for themselves, but also for left-behind children and family members back home in Indonesia, the Philippines and Myanmar. The concept of foodcare which offers ‘low-income mothers an alternative to the logic of capital for their demonstration of self-worth’ (Parsons et al. 2020) is developed and extended in conjunction with the classic idea of global care chains (Hochschild 2000) to offer the idea of transnational foodcare chains. This distinctly agentic, migrant, and maternal food labour was conducted under exceptional times of global pandemic-induced heightened social distancing, economic precarity, and limited travel. The foodcare chains that emerged are dually oriented. Firstly, these foodcare chains are multi-relational (i.e. in relation not just to children but to other left-behind family members too) across transnational space, paralleling the relationality of the family migration project. Secondly, foodcare chains are also emplaced horizontally, extending to fellow migrant domestic worker friendships forged in Singapore. Thirdly, under pandemic conditions, foodcare chains also enter the domain of health and healthcare as food became evoked as medicine.  

SPEAKER DETAILS 

Dr Chand Somaiah holds a joint appointment as Lecturer with Yale-NUS College, and NUS College. She is an Associate with the Asian Migration cluster, at the Asia Research Institute, NUS. Her research interests include embodied, emplaced, intersectional and intimate citizenship practices and subjectivities vis-à-vis migration. She earned her PhD (Sociology) in 2017 from Macquarie University where she studied socialreconstructions of immigrant mothering among a minority community of first-generation Coorg women, (Kodavathees) living in urban Karnataka, Singapore, and Sydney. 

ADDITIONAL DETAILS 

This seminar is online only via Zoom. Please reach out directly to rose.butler@deakin.edu.au for the zoom details and to RSVP.