Fragile familiarity in transnational home care arrangements for older people

This paper examines the notion of familiarity in live-in elder care settings
and how it is challenged, changed, and reestablished. Live-in care is a
strategy to prevent disruptions and preserve familiarity in enabling older
persons in need of extensive care to stay at home – and thus, to enable
ageing in place. This paper problematizes this strategy based on interviews
with family caregivers who engaged a migrant live-in care worker in
Switzerland. The key argument is that live-in care arrangements constitute
an all-embracing form of inserting formal, paid-for care service delivery
into the informal, private, intimate space of home. The live-in care arrangement
not only challenges the familiarity of the home space, but also seems
to ask for strategies of adaptation to familiarize the unfamiliar. Therefore,
the introduction of live-in care is consequential for all involved parties and
requires largely underestimated efforts to adapt to the new home space.
Keywords: care migration, familiarity, home, home care, live-in care,
long-term care, old-age care, transnational care.