Our research considers care circulations with a focus on how transnational relations, ageing and care ethics (TRACE) extend across national borders. We investigate how global care circulations mediate experiences of ageing and what this means for transnational relations and care ethics. Increasingly, older adults are moving across national borders to provide care or to receive care; also participating in such care circulations are younger transnational migrants who are family members of those older adults or who have been employed to care for older adults. Study of how ageing is experienced across national borders and through transnationalism remains an underdeveloped field both in terms of empirical research and wider theorisation.

Our TRACE project considers three interrelated aspects of care circulation: (1) grandparenting migration; (2) caring for the aged and the left-behind care chains of foreign carers; and (3) retirement migration. The project focuses on Singapore as a hub where the logics of care mediate migration inflows and outflows, connecting the country to regional sites of care such as Myanmar and China, which we have identified for study. Our project also sets Singapore in international comparative perspective with Australia, which experiences similar care-mediated migration trends that connect the country to China. This project thus considers regional care connections as well as international comparisons of ageing and care.

We combine qualitative research methods with GIS analysis and visualisation to spatially depict and deepen understanding of ageing. Our mixed methods approach enables the project to integrate analyses of micro-mobility and macro-mobility, developing a grounded understanding of care relations that is useful for (re)conceptualising care ethics in transnational contexts.

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