AAS Distinguished Lecture

The Australian Anthropological Society welcomes Distinguished Lecturer Loretta Baldassar to the State Library of Western Australia!

Social Death, Flying Grannies and Digital Kinning: Caring across distance over a century of Australian migration

In this public lecture, leading migration scholar, Professor Loretta Baldassar, explores how the revolution in travel and communication technologies has transformed our ability to care – for people and places – across time and distance. Drawing on 40 years of research and hundreds of migrant family stories, she examines over a century of Australian migration history. Baldassar’s research is widely acknowledged as foundational to the field of transnational family studies. By comparing the forms of caring and kin work experienced by different cohorts and generations, she maps the ways our experiences and understandings have shaped and been shaped by changing migration and social policy. In the past, the migration of a loved one was often experienced as a kind of ‘social death’. In contrast, today’s polymedia environments allow us to experience co-presence across distance in virtual, proxy, ambient and imagined ways. These forms of digital care and “digital kinning” challenge the normative and ontological privileging of proximity in caregiving and kinship relationships. Of particular importance is the special role of visits home and how, over time, they become a window on relationships and identities. Baldassar’s research findings inform her more recent applied anthropology work in the increasingly important and contested spaces at the intersections of migration, ageing and aged-care. Older adults’ support networks are often reduced due to the mobility of their family and friends. At the same time, many embark on their own mobility trajectories to give or receive care, like the growing number of ‘flying grannies’. And what of migrants who can no longer travel, or who are living in residential care? Baldassar’s work with migrants living in residential care highlights how in the absence of the ability to visit home, digital technologies can provide the capacity to share a mutuality of being that safeguards the forms of belonging that make us human.

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Loretta Baldassar is a leading migration scholar and Professor of Anthropology and Sociology. She is currently Vice Chancellor Professorial Research Fellow, Director of the Social Ageing (SAGE) Futures Lab, and co-convener of the TRACS Migration Research Network at Edith Cowan University. In 2020, 2021 and 2022 she was named Australian Research Field Leader in Migration Studies (Social Sciences) and in 2021 and 2022 she was also named Research Field Leader in Ethnic and Cultural Studies (Humanities, Arts and Literature) (The Australian, 23 09 2020; 8 12 2021; 10 11 2022). Professor Baldassar has published extensively and her widely-cited work is foundational to the field of Transnational Family Studies. She is an award-winning supervisor with over 30 PhD completions and 9 postdoctoral fellowships. She has led many large research projects with a total grant income of over 10 million dollars. Among her many current projects she leads a Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) project, Befriending with Genie, trialling an intervention to support people living with dementia and their carers from migrant communities. She is social support stream lead on an MRFF Fittest Trial, National Frailty Project and co-lead investigator on the longitudinal YMAP Project (Youth Mobilities, Aspirations and Pathways), funded by the Australian Research Council. Her career has been devoted to better understanding the impact of migration on families and communities, with a focus intergenerational relations, the ageing process and the social uses of new technologies. Her SAGE Futures research team at ECU is leading innovation in social care across the life-course, contributing social science perspectives and arts-based methodologies to the creative and caring professions.

Host or Publisher The Australian Anthropological Society