I’m working on an edited collection with my esteemed colleague and excellent scholar, Valerie Francisco-Menchavez at San Francisco State University. We have secured some wonderful contributions already and we are looking to cast the net far and wide to complete the collection. Please see the details below and get in touch if you need any further information. Submit a title, 300-500 word abstract and brief biographical note to vfm@sfsu.edu by April 15. First chapter drafts will be due in October 2024 (subject to discussions with publisher).
About the Collection:
This interdisciplinary collection brings together leading and emerging scholars of migration and care from across the world. Separately and together, their contributions explore the often-unrecognised labour of care given and received between migrants, organised under the concept of “Communities of Care in Migration.” The collection takes a new and fresh look at migration from the perspective of migrants and their communities. Building on the concepts of horizontal care (Francisco-Menchavez), relational mobility and relational settlement (Williams Veazey), the collection explores local and transnational relationships and practices of care in the lives of migrants in diverse contexts, including the USA, Australia, Asia, Africa and Europe.
Migration disrupts, fractures and re-shapes migrants’ social infrastructures, requiring migrants to make new connections, re-building communities and nurturing new relationships. At the heart of this core migrant practice is the concept, and labour, of care as collectively produced and enacted. In focusing on “communities of care”, we de-centre the often linear and hierarchical organization of care work and care practices that describe the labour and bonds between kin within a biological, normative, and spatially bound definition of family. We ground this work in the scholarship of feminists of colour (Hill Collins), in which care work is expanded beyond the narrow confines of a biologically determined family formation, and beyond formal, paid care work, and is to be found (instead or as well) located in networks of peers, friends and allies. We aim, therefore, to highlight the horizontal and multidirectional care among migrants (Francisco-Menchavez, Williams Veazey). The often-unrecognised labour of care given and received between migrants manifests in the thick and complex networks or webs of care that many migrants create and sustain. In this way, communities of care disrupt narratives that focus on assimilative ‘parallel societies’ or ‘immigrant enclaves’ on the one hand, and migrants as recipients of state/voluntary care from the receiving/host community, on the other.
Migrants’ communities of care are incommensurate to formal metrics of capital and politics and are often brought about by conditions of dispossession, displacement and violence. Yet these structural constraints, including gendered migration patterns, racialised labour, transnational family separation, and inequitable access to services and welfare, provide a clear basis for points of unity, fostering relationships of solidarity and political organizing (Tungohan). Rather than networks to merely exchange resources for upward mobility and assimilation, this volume uplifts creative strategies of survival that make room for friendship and joy, mutual aid and radical politics, network- and movement-building across digital and creative modalities. These reorganized care connections can produce new identity formations and subjectivities informed by local, national and transnational contexts.
Although our primary focus here is on solidarity, joy, and survival, it is also clear that in these complex entanglements of care and interdependence, there also exist practices and relationships of harm, exploitation and neglect. Indeed, at times, practices and relationships that appear to be ‘caring’ may reproduce, obscure or naturalise harm, thereby perpetuating the very inequalities and injustices they purport to address. The collection will thus also include consideration of the darker underbelly of migrant communities.
Aimed at scholars of migration, care and transnationalism, this book provides new intellectual insights and brings together scholars working in diverse geographical and disciplinary contexts to provide a fresh look at migration in action.
Call for chapters
We invite chapter proposals on the topic of ‘Communities of Care in Migration’ that speak specifically or broadly to the framing outlined above. We particularly welcome proposals on the following topics, but are very open to alternative proposals:
- Methodologies for researching migrant communities of care
- Historical approaches to communities of care in migration
- Communities of care amongst older migrants, or intergenerational communities
- Communities of care based around digital platforms
- Spaces and places of care
- Resistance and activism: Politics, advocacy, care activism
- Chapters focusing on geographical locations currently underrepresented in migration literature, including the Gulf states and Africa.
- Resistance and activism: Politics, advocacy, care activism
- Community responses to precarity and/or crisis
- Joy, exuberance, humour, creativity in migrant community
- Redefining care, care work and community in migration
- Gendered communities of care
- Intersections of care and harm in migrant communities
About the editors:
Dr. Valerie Francisco-Menchavez is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Sexuality Studies at San Francisco State University where she is committed to teaching, organising and conducting research on the topics of Filipina migration, transnational lives, family-making in the United States and in the Philippines. Her first award-winning book entitled, The Labor of Care: Filipina Migrants and Transnational Families in the Digital Age (2018), explores the dynamics of gender and technology of care work and intimacy in Filipino transnational families in the Philippines and the U.S. Through an examination of neoliberal immigration policies and market forces, Francisco contextualises the shifts in the long-standing transnational family formation in the Philippines. Her forthcoming book project, Caring for Caregivers: Filipina Migrant Workers and Community Building during Crisis is an examination of the lives of Filipina caregivers in the San Francisco/Bay Area before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, and more importantly, the solidarity built among them.
https://socsxs.sfsu.edu/valerie-francisco-menchavez
https://www.linkedin.com/in/valerie-francisco-menchavez-a0a062211
Dr. Leah Williams Veazey is ARC DECRA Research Fellow in the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies, School of Social and Political Sciences at The University of Sydney, Australia. Her research centres around migration, care, health, motherhood and digital cultures. Her first award-winning book entitled, Migrant Mothers in the Digital Age: Emotion and Belonging in Migrant Maternal Online Communities (2021), explores the experiences of migrant mothers in Australia through the lens of their online communities, arguing for the importance of examining relationships among mothers and migrants as they move, settle and establish themselves in a new country. Building on this work, her new project uses the concept of relational mobility to explore the transnational and local intersections of care and work in the lives of migrant healthcare workers and students in Australia. Dr Williams Veazey co-convenes The Australian Sociological Association’s Migration, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism Thematic Group, and co-leads the Migration, Im/mobility and Belonging Research Theme at the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies. She is Associate Editor at the Australian Journal of Social Issues, and an Associate Investigator at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child.
https://www.sydney.edu.au/arts/about/our-people/academic-staff/leah-williamsveazey.html
https://www.linkedin.com/in/leahmouse
Leah Williams Veazey 
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