Cati Coe is the Canada Research Chair in Migration and Care. Dr. Coe is an internationally recognized leader in the scholarship of transnational families, aging, and care work, winning awards for her previous books The Scattered Family: Parenting, African Migrants, and Global Inequality (2013), The New American Servitude: Political Belonging among African Immigrant Home Care Workers (2019), and Changes in Care: Aging, Migration and Social Class in West Africa (2021).
Migration in Transnational Families
Dr. Coe is known for her careful analysis of how parents’ migration can cause various degrees of rupture in transnational families, her argument that international migration should be studied within the framework of the longer history and broader phenomenon of urban migration, and her leadership in initiating a new focus on children’s experiences within the field of migration studies. Her current research projects arise from questions that emerged from her previous scholarship on African migrant care workers in the United States.
Transnational Social Protection and the Care of Aging Migrants
One project, entitled “Transnational Social Protection and the Care of Aging Migrants,” examines the decisions around return migration made by aging Ghanaian migrants in Canada. What affects aging migrants’ decisions about where to live? How do they evaluate the presence of kin, nostalgia for the home country, differences in cost of living, and state forms of care in determining where to age? Do these decisions shift as they become mentally or physically frail?
Social Protections
Aging migrants from the Global South to the Global North attain the right to social protections from the host country on the basis of living and working there for decades. They lose some of those protections if they return to their country of origin on the point of retirement or ill-health, because their country of origin offers less comprehensive social protections for which they are often not eligible because of years of residence and employment elsewhere, and because not all the social protections in the host country are portable across national boundaries.
Navigating transnational dilemmas in care
This research aims to explore how aging migrants navigate transnational dilemmas in care as they age, and how they value various aspects of the care economies available in different places. In particular, this research explores how decision-making about where to age changes over time, in response to shifting life circumstances, by engaging in longitudinal, ongoing, and intensive research with a small number of aging migrants, framed by a wider survey and ongoing ethnographic research.
Services, Policies and Interventions for Aging Migrants
The public impact of the research is to make visible the challenges faced by transnational aging migrants, who are generally not considered in policy discussions of aging, because of the assumptions that social welfare is a national issue and that aging citizens are resident in the country of citizenship. It will illuminate the needed services, policies, and interventions for aging migrants, both in the Global North and Global South.
Global Inequalities in Aged Care
The scholarly contribution of the research to the literature on migration is to examine the patchwork nature of social protections that aging migrants from the Global South experience, and the choices they make in relation to the care economies they face. Their choices both illustrate the global inequalities in aged care, and may further contribute to them, because their decisions about where to live may determine which countries bear the costs of their care. In studying aging and migration together, this research program will expand and inform our understanding of how and why aging migrants make decisions about their care.
Interdisciplinary Scholars Explore Domestic Worker Activism
Dr. Coe is also involved in bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore domestic worker organising comparatively, looking at the involvement of domestic workers in vocal and active social movements as well as the varied hidden forms of resistance that they engage in through their relationships with their employers, one another, and their families. In 2011, to much acclaim and after much activism by domestic worker organisations, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) passed a new and historic Domestic Workers Convention (no. 189) and a Domestic Workers Recommendation (no. 201), aimed at improving the conditions for domestic workers and recognising them as workers, a formal legal status that they had often been denied in national labour legislation.
Rights of Domestic Workers
This agreement spurred a number of struggles within member states to create similar legislation enshrining the rights of domestic workers, particularly in Latin America. Yet attempts to secure dignity for domestic work through formalisation seldom produce outcomes for workers that regulators and others anticipate. Workers themselves often reject these measures owing to their misalignments with their subjective, experiential, and historical understandings of domestic work.
This group of scholars working in multiple sites around the world will interrogate whether struggles to define domestic work as formal employment are effective, desirable, or even possible as a means of securing jobs with dignity. Several workshops are planned, involving outreach with domestic worker organising groups, media publications, and other activist-scholars, as well as publications bringing this work together.
Outcomes
We anticipate this collaborative project will advance the scholarship on labour in two ways. One, it highlights the strengths and limitations of relying on formal labour law because of its (dis)connection with workers’ narrations of their goals, strategies, and struggles. Two, we expand on the literature which has illustrated how labour protections were based on a North American male breadwinner model dependent on a distinction between the private (household) and public (work) spheres, in arguing that the modes of exploitation and resistance in work are interconnected with other areas of everyday life.
We aim to complicate these existing models with ethnographically grounded theory that centres the experiences of women workers who are often impoverished and representative of racialised/ethnicised/subaltern populations and immigrant communities in the countries in which they work.