•Biographical data of family members.•The relations between older parents and adult children.•The resilience and flexibility of rural households.•The webs of interdependence that feature in the daily ...strategies of householding.•The role of gender in daily householding.
Accelerated by economic reforms, a large scale migration of younger workers from rural to urban China has taken place since the 1990s. This has separated many adult children from their ageing parents and imposed significant challenges on traditional patterns of familial support for rural older people. These challenges are augmented by the fact that in rural China the elderly have been deprived a state pension and other welfare provisions available to urban residents.
Drawing upon qualitative data from a project on ageing in rural China, this article examines the agency of older people and their families in responding to geographical separation resulting from the migration of the economically active to the cities. Through 32 life history interviews with multiple generations of nine households in one rural village, this article sheds light on the resilience and flexibility of rural households which have experienced migration and highlights the webs of interdependence that feature in the daily strategies of householding. It shows how members of the household across different geographical locations worked together to build and maintain the collective welfare of the family. In particular, this article argues that it would be over simplistic to suggest that migration is always detrimental to the older generation who stay behind. Contrary to assumptions in some migration studies and ageing literature in China, it shows that it is the breakdown of the webs of interdependence and reciprocity rather than the event of migration that will have inevitable negative effects upon old age care for the seniors in the household. Further, while highlighting the significance of householding, this article reveals the internal dynamics within a household. It identifies the role of gender in daily householding and suggests that the caring, supportive and kin-keeping roles performed mainly by women played a critical role in ensuring social and physical reproduction across generations. The article finds that while daughters took over some responsibilities which were traditionally expected from their brothers and sisters-in-law in old age support, the persistence of gendered practices and traditions in rural villages allowed sons more symbolic status and material benefits.
► The concept of ‘householding’ bridges the migrant vs. stayer divide in migration research. ► Relations of relative seniority capture intra-household dynamics better than chronological age. ► ...Relations of relative seniority are gendered. ► Households are in flux due to life-cycle related events and processes of rural transformation. ► Young women are most inclined to migrate as well as most inclined to stay in rural Lao households.
This paper conceptualises migration and staying by young rural Lao in the empirical context of above replacement level fertility as manifestations of ‘householding’ that interacts with other dimensions of householding. Drawing on the framework of the inter-generational contract and by juxtaposing qualitative and quantitative data I show that becoming a young migrant and becoming or remaining a young stayer is shaped by young migrants’ situated agency.
The second part of the paper departs from conventional household-based analyses and introduces the notion of ‘households in flux’. This highlights the dynamic interaction between changing external dynamics affecting rural households, and internal dynamics that constantly reconfigure the field of the household. These conceptual readjustments require going beyond inflexible notions of the household, the analytical disconnection between a focus on migrants and stayers in migration research, and static readings of relations of gender and generation. Furthermore, the paper argues that intra-household relations need to be appreciated as gendered relations of relative seniority which are in the process of householding constantly made and remade, among other things, by young dependents through ‘staying’ and ‘leaving’. These conceptual moves help explain the empirical puzzle of why in rural Lao households young women are both the ones most inclined to become a young migrant as well as most inclined to become or remain a young stayer.
Given the central role of households in motivating and implementing migration, this paper argues that the “householding” and split-household approaches are fundamental and essential for migration ...research, by drawing from original research on rural-urban migrants in China and four published studies on Asian migrants. Translocality and household-splitting that enable the earning of remittances or help meet other family goals such as children's education, set in motion processes of gender and intergenerational divisions of labor that involve both the migrants and the left-behind, and have implications for urban development in large cities as well as cities near rural areas. Hundreds of millions of rural migrants in China circulate between their home villages and host cities, and large numbers of women from Southeast Asia work overseas. Likewise, skilled migrants from South Asia and East Asia maintain transnational households that straddle their home and host countries. Household biographies and interviewees' narratives from these examples highlight two strategies of migrants and their family members: their flexibility and frequent changes of location, work, activity, and household arrangement; and their reinventing women's and men's responsibilities without challenging traditional gender ideology. These stories underscore the importance of householding and split-households for informing contemporary migration theories and research.
•Both international and internal migrants pursue “householding” and split-household strategies.•Both migrants to cities and the left-behind contribute to sustaining and maintaining the split households.•Members of split households change frequently their location, work, and household arrangement.•Migrants and the left-behind reinvent their family responsibilities vis-à-vis gender norms.•Experiences of Asian migrants to cities are important for migration theories and research.
In this paper, we scrutinise the sharing economy from a moral householding perspective and evaluate the moral justifications for a sustainable form of the sharing economy. We consider the emergence ...of normative moral justifications through householding practices that rest on local mobilisation of people in defence of communities and commitments against the adverse impacts of neoliberal market capitalism. Our perspective draws on Karl Polanyi's conceptualisation of householding, that is, autarchic, communistic provision in a closed community. Using timebanking as an example, we illustrate how a moral sharing economy can be mobilised in collective battles against the current neoliberal system of economic crisis. We contribute to the amassing sharing economy literature emphasising a central, yet missing element of the current discourse: householding as practices creating self-sufficiency and autonomy as well as combining both kin and stranger.
This article combines perspectives from feminist agricultural economics and agrarian feminist Marxism to conceptualize the spatial process of translocality from a gender perspective arguing for the ...resurrection of the household as a unit of study in the context of translocality. Engendering the emerging field of translocal livelihoods research requires understanding the household both as a process, but also as an institution that upholds patriarchal control over resources and gender based norms, in relation to its members as well as the broader community. Gender roles may be renegotiated as a result of translocality but they occur in contexts that uphold broader patriarchal norms. The material, social and emotional bases for engaging in processes of translocal householding and re-negotiating gender roles differ, in relation to the livelihood options of particular households, but also with respect to broader social and economic processes.
•The rural household is central to understanding the possibilities for engaging in translocal livelihoods.•It is a site of power and resource control and the gendered division of labour affects mobility.•Translocal householding can lead to negotiation around social reproduction, production and gender roles.•Community level patriarchal structures affect the possibilities for negotiating such roles.•Broader social, economic and cultural processes influence the possibilities for outcomes to be empowering.•South East and East Asia can be contrasted with sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Analyzing intimacy is in vogue across an array of disciplines. Geographers too have taken up intimacy, engaging it from a variety of perspectives and, as elsewhere, without agreeing on definitional ...properties. Conventionally understood as a site, space or scale, intimacy figures in (asymmetric) binaries of global-local, national-familial and public-private. In contrast, Pratt and Rosner paired ‘the global and the intimate’ in a double issue of Women's Studies Quarterly and asked contributors to ‘disrupt traditional organizations of space, to forge productive dislocations, and to reconfigure conventions of scale’ (2006, p. 16). Their essays and related work expanded the range of inquiry and spurred further discussion of the global-intimate relationship, while other scholars explored intimacy through studies of emotion, sexuality, subjectification and the everyday (Harker & Martin, 2012; Oswin & Olund, 2010; Valentine, 2008). Most recently, Pain and Staeheli's (2014; also Pain 2014, 2015) articulation of ‘intimacy-geopolitics’ aims to dissolve the binary and its presumptive hierarchy of global-local.
The citizenship of marriage migrants in South Korea has been discussed in terms of their roles as mothers in the context of Korea’s aging population and care crisis. However, as marriage migrants ...increasingly participate in the labor market, their individual rights as workers, and more specifically as working mothers, bring attention to the question of women’s citizenship in South Korea. Care provision is a key issue in the discussion on working mothers’ citizenship. This article focuses on global householding as a process of supporting the participation of marriage migrants in paid work. It highlights the role of the natal family of marriage migrants, especially their parents, as sources of care support to marriage migrants as well as recipients of care. The family visits of the parents of marriage migrants show how parents participate in the internationalization of social reproduction. This article contributes to understanding the household and family as a unit of analysis in the discussion of social reproduction and citizenship in East Asia. It also raises the issue of the embedded gender division of labor in the process of global householding.
The transition from state socialism to market socialism in Vietnam and China has been characterized by unprecedented rural-urban migration. We argue that this migration is integral rather than ...incidental to the gendered reproduction of state and society. A review of the emerging literature on trans-local householding explores the process whereby the reflexive engagement of the state and the household remakes rural-urban differentiation in ways that are deeply gendered and classed. As such, state regulation and control of migrants are part of a process of reconfiguring state-society relations in which the production of space and the symbolic valuation of ruralness and urbanness have become a central trope.
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