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Abstract
Objective: We explore how information communication technologies (ICTs) enable doing kin work through communication and its impact on the well-being of Ghanaians at home and abroad.
Background: Using ICTs has become a significant and rapid way to keep in touch with family relations as they are "scattered" across different geographic spaces within a country and globally. In this digital age, families can choose from a wide range of options that allows the combination of textual, verbal, and visual interactions.
Method: This paper is based on observations, in-depth interviews, and life stories collected over a cumulative fieldwork period of 28 months. A total of 40 Ghanaians living in the Netherlands and 30 living in Ghana were recruited from 2017 to 2019 for this study.
Results: Through smartphones or messenger apps, people share their life and provide care and support including financial, emotional, moral, personal, and communal attachment.
Conclusion: Doing family online involves a complex, open, and hidden system of support, care, anxiety, and empathy. Doing family online is an example of a social matrix in which new patterns of social relationships, intimacies, care, and intergenerational solidarities emerge and develop.
Implications: We propose that doing family online will remain an integral means of connecting with family members and other relations. It is therefore important that ICT is made affordable, reliable, and secure as a way to improve its use. This means that more innovation, development, and research would be required.
KEYWORDS
communication, family, Ghana, ICT, migration, the Netherlands
Introduction
The concept of transnational families has shifted the perspective of the family as a bounded geographical unit to family as a social unit that can be maintained across distance and national boundaries (Bryceson & Vuorela, 2002). Despite the emotional suffering that results from geographical separation, family members can live "apart-together" (Baldassar & Merla, 2013) through transnational family practices such as long-distance communication, return visits, and remittances. Although there is abundant literature on transnational families, the majority of these research works focus mainly on analyzing daily overseas transnational family interactions that keep families functioning across geographical distance (e.g., Ahlin, 2020; Baldassar, 2008; Poeze, 2019).
To our knowledge, few studies have investigated the day-to-day care work from the perspectives of those who have not migrated and those who...