Events

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Elaine Ho, Asia Research Institute, and Department of Geography, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

In a digital era, the home has been increasingly reconfigured through the diffusion of data-driven mobile devices, social, media, mobile applications, and emerging technologies. Technological apparatuses have mediatized many aspects of people’s personal, familial and social domains. For older migrants, the digitalisation of the home comes with paradoxical consequences. While it provides a range of communicative benefits, it also amplifies digital exclusion, as shaped by an individual’s differing access, skills, and capabilities. As part of a larger Australian Research Council (ARC) DECRA project involving multi-sited and visual ethnography (2023–2025), this provocation critically examines the ways older Filipino Australians in Victoria, Australia and their support networks in Victoria, Australia and across the Philippines navigate the digital divide in a networked home through a landscape of mediated, care-driven and informal strategies. Deploying the ‘ageing in networks’ perspective (Ho, Chua, & Feng, 2024) to understand the impacts of the digital divide on the lives of ageing migrants, I propose the concept of a ‘socio-technical care vortex’, an asymmetrical digitally-mediated care terrain comprised of four key dimensions, including (1) co-living, (2) proximate, (3) transnational, and (4) virtual. In the first instance, such environment is operationalised through a range of mediated support provided by local, transnational and even virtual networks for older migrants, facilitating a healthy physical, emotional and social wellbeing in a digital home. Yet, deeply influenced by power structures and uneven spatio-temporal and structural conditions, it also generates exclusionary digital experiences among older migrants. Ultimately, by mapping the socio-technical and informal care infrastructures in digitalised domestic and transnational environments, this presentation reveals the affective balancing act exercised and embodied by older migrants to navigate the contradictions of sourcing informal strategies for mitigating digital barriers and constraints.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Earvin Charles B. Cabalquinto is Research Fellow under the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Early Career Researcher Award, and Senior Lecturer in the School of Media, Film and Journalism at Monash University, Australia. He is also the author of (Im)mobile Homes: Family Life at a Distance in the Age of Mobile Media (Oxford University Press), and editorial board member of International Journal of Cultural Studies and Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. He has held visiting fellowships in the United Kingdom (2019), Finland (2021), and Canada (2024). His expertise lies in the intersecting fields of digital media, mobilities, migration, and ageing research. His research agenda is driven by critically exploring the dynamics and impacts of digital inclusion and exclusion among migrants and their networks who navigate an increasingly digital and global society.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this hybrid talk has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to ziqi@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the event.