In China, over 200 million rural-urban migrants work away from their children, spouses and/or elderly parents to support their 'lifemaking', family reproduction and development, especially through educational and housing investments.
Meanwhile, in recent years, with state support, commercial telecoms providers in China have been competing for internet and home security camera customers in rural areas, while rural-urban migrants are prominent among those who install these e-cameras in their houses, courtyards and chicken coups.
The migrants use their mobile phone's livestreaming apps to monitor their left-behind children, check that their elderly parents are well, and reassure themselves that their rural property is protected.
This project will probe:
- How do individuals give meaning to care as they remotely supervise their children?
- How do those who are watched over experience this care?
- What happens to relationships, identities and conduct when individuals' lifemaking is always visible to others?
Drawing on detailed combing and analysis of multiple kinds of materials and on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among the members of spatially separated families in China, this project will address these questions.
The project will further aim to develop a larger funded research project on visibilised life-making in the context of China's rapidly changing digital ecosystem.
