Time, space and care: Rethinking transnational care from a temporal perspective

Against the background of unprecedented international migration, it is not clear how people’s transnational mobility and ties have intersected with the temporalities associated with places or spaces. Drawing on the data from an empirical study of the caregiving experiences of Chinese grandparents in Canada, this case study reveals the simultaneous, yet uneven, temporal impacts of transnational care on individual, familial, and transnational levels. Although the coexistence of multiple temporalities enables Chinese skilled immigrant families to mobilize care resources across generations and nation-states, the dominance of the neoliberal temporal framework also means various consequences of such transnational ‘flexibility’. I argue that rethinking transnational care from a temporal perspective helps us identify the linkages, discrepancies and contradictions between ‘global time’ and peripheral temporalities and between time and space, and thus makes visible the inequalities – in particular, the temporal inequalities – embedded in human migration and social relations on a transnational scale.