Sending Granny to Chiang Mai: debating global outsourcing of care for the elderly
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article ties in with existing discussions on global care chains, family separation and the devaluation of social‐reproductive work. We explore the new trend of outsourcing care for the elderly to countries with lower wages. We base our analysis on the debate in the German press and supplement it with insights from ethnographic field observations in two care homes in Thailand. We identify a discourse of abandonment, which shows how outsourcing the care of the elderly unsettles the privilege of sedentarism that is often taken for granted in the Global North. Furthermore, the newspaper articles tend to villainize people who seek care for their loved ones abroad. We argue that both discourses foster a neoliberal rationale of individualized responsibility and obfuscate the deep systemic roots of the care crisis in the Global North. However, by extending the discussion on outsourcing care for the elderly beyond the dominant media discourses, we envisage a rich potential for provoking political debate on the revaluation of care.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".