New Futures of Care, Labour and Kinship in Thailand

The World Health Organisation projects that by 2050 the number of people aged 80 and over will quadruple to 395 million, with an estimated one in six likely to develop dementia. This figure signals and projects a social and health care crisis across the ‘advanced’ industrial world and beyond. In the space of state withdrawal, punishing austerity, the financialisation of eldercare and profound labour shortage, what options exist for families? What choices are people making who are desperately struggling with the fiscal and emotional labour of dementia care? This talk considers one such radical geography. Drawing on ongoing research, we examine the ‘outsourcing’ of dementia care from Europe and North America to Chiang Mai, Thailand – a hot spot for this emerging care economy. We work with interviews with family members, care workers and facility operators to think through what this migration tells us about reconfigurations of care, and we consider what our theorising from Thailand might bring into our existing critiques of the political economy of care relations in the West. Lastly, we reflect upon the research to ask questions about the limits of the private family as a source of unpaid labour, and to think about what new intimacies and extra-familial relations of kinship may be developing as a lived experience beyond and alongside the family and the familiar.

Author

Dr Caleb Johnston is a Reader in Human Geography at Newcastle University whose work examines political economies of care, labour migration, and creative geographies. His scholarship has been widely published in Antipode, cultural geographies, Transactions, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Society and Space, and elsewhere. With Geraldine Pratt, he co-authored Migration in Performance: Crossing the Colonial Present, a monograph exploring the use of documentary theatre to circulate experiences of violence associated with labour migration and entwined colonialisms between Canada and the Philippines. He is currently examining different responses to our shared crisis in elder care and social reproduction. For more, see: https://calebjohnston.uk/

Host or Publisher Ageing Futures Research Group - University of Bristol