Digital technologies are a crucial element in sustaining family relations and care in transnational contexts. But what are the intricacies of their impact on these relations and on providing care? I propose the concept of “transnational care collectives” to describe how digital technologies not only support, but also participate in enacting family care at a distance and thereby shape it. This notion arises from long-term ethnographic fieldwork among transnational families of migrating nurses from Kerala, South India. In India, good elder care is associated with practices that demand physical proximity, like intergenerational co-residence and food sharing. Such understanding of care has given rise to a popular discourse which sees migrating children as abandoning their aging parents. However, my fieldwork has shown that within transnational care collectives, migration becomes re-conceptualized from an act of abandonment to an act of elder care. I argue that migrating children do not care less because they are physically far away from their parents, but that the meanings and practices of good elder care become transformed, a process which is importantly shaped by digital technologies. Frequent calling transpires as a key practice of family care, not only to alleviate loneliness, but also to manage health conditions at a distance. This became particularly transparent during the Covid19 pandemic when travelling to India was nearly impossible and the children’s involvement with their parents’ healthcare through smartphones could be a matter of life and death. Additionally, digital technologies not only afforded older adults to stay connected with their family members, but also to enact care for their children and grandchildren living far away. The dynamic within transnational care collectives thus shifted in surprising ways: while older adults were considered the most vulnerable and in need of care, digital devices afforded them to be carers too.
