This paper explores the intersections of formal and informal care in the relationships that develop between elderly care receivers and their families and migrant domestic care workers and their families. The domestic migrant care literature has tended to focus on two main ‘hidden costs’ of this ‘care-chain’: the ‘care exploitation’ of paid carers by their employers and the ‘care drain’ impact on the family members left behind by the migrant. In this paper, we employ a care circulation framework to examine the process of becoming kin-like–or ‘kinning’, which remains relatively under-explored and warrants further research. An analysis of this process of kinning helps to highlight how the domestic space of care receiver homes are transformed–through the negotiation of relationships with migrant care workers–into transnational social fields that bring the diaspora worlds of the migrants into the everyday worlds of the locals. © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Transnational care domestic care work transnational migration kinning Fictive kin

labor migration working conditions domestic work diaspora migrant worker elderly care kinship