Reworking of care during workday outings: On migrant domestic workers’ everyday negotiation of migration infrastructure in the global city of Hong Kong

Abstract

This paper examines care as a contested bio-political arena defining the daily lives of live-in domestic care migrants in Hong Kong. It asks what roles migration infrastructures and mundane city landscapes play in mediating associ-ated everyday care dynamics. Empirically, it examines two sets of care-related infrastructures in the city that intimately mediate the population’s everyday experience of care. The paper first examines the ways the regulatory infrastructures of the city state, whose operational logics are aligned with the production of ‘permanent temporariness’ and disposability, systematically deny migrants’ access to institutional care for themselves. Second, the papers examine the ways care migrants improvise with the city’s situational urban geographies and their human bodies as infrastructure resources during regular work-bound urban outings to elaborate provisional, localised and informal care infrastructures. While not without challenges, these improvised informal care infrastructures essentially allow the migrant care-labor population to live with their institu-tionalised precarity. Overall, the paper makes three contributions. First, it reconceptualises live-in domestic care migrants as urban actors capable of both navigating and crafting their own care infrastructures in the city, even during workdays. Second, it foregrounds ‘care’ as an urban and socio-technical construct in relation to both bio-political control and interpersonal coping. Third, it employs the ideas of precarity, provisionality and robustness to unpack the bio-political systems that shape migrants’ experiences of care. The findings are based on an analysis of the city’s migration regulations and the actual urban work-life stories of a small group of live-in domestic care migrants based on participants’ personal diaries and interviews with the participants.