Migrant Domestic Workers' Food Security & Transnational Foodcare Chains

Abstract

This talk draws upon findings from 55 qualitative interviews with migrant domestic workers (MDWs) based in Singapore around themes surrounding their migration, food security, and carework. A transnational lens is employed to look not just at MDWs’ own experiences around securing access to food for themselves, but also for left-behind children and family members back home in Indonesia, the Philippines and Myanmar. The concept of foodcare which offers ‘low-income mothers an alternative to the logic of capital for their demonstration of self-worth’ (Parsons et al. 2020) is developed and extended in conjunction with the classic idea of global care chains (Hochschild 2000) to offer the idea of transnational foodcare chains. This distinctly agentic, migrant, and maternal food labour was conducted under exceptional times of global pandemic-induced heightened social distancing, economic precarity, and limited travel.