Calling Family: Digital Technologies and the Making of Transnational Care Collectives

In a poignant scene in the book Calling Family (Ahlin 2023), Sara, a nurse working in Oman who routinely monitors her mother's medication side effects, researches drug information online, consults with doctors both locally and in Kerala, and advises her family on treatment adjustments. In doing so, she merges her professional expertise with her role as a daughter, showing how caregiving is ‘tinkered’ into being across geographies and digital platforms. This ‘tinkering’ is not incidental; rather, it is the core of how transnational families sustain care in the absence of co-residence and forms a crucial part of the book. While working on a project about ageing, care and migration, I began immersing myself in literature on the anthropology of ageing. I quickly realized that despite an abundance of research articles, there are relatively few book-length ethnographies in this field. Among those, Calling Family: Digital Technologies and the Making of Transnational Care Collectives by Tanja Ahlin immediately caught my attention. The book is based on an ethnographic study of Malayali nurses working in the Gulf who maintain relationships and provide care to their families in Kerala through digital technologies. Its themes resonated deeply with my observations from Punjab, where migration is an everyday reality, and where countless families sustain intimacy across borders via video calls, WhatsApp messages and even the small but symbolically loaded act of leaving a ‘missed call’. Ahlin's work stands at the intersection of anthropology, migration studies, science and technology studies (STS), care ethics and gerontology. Her project speaks to some of the most pressing debates in ageing research. In much of the dominant discourse, especially in Western gerontology, ageing has been framed as a problem or crisis. It is often associated with physical and cognitive decline, dependency on younger generations and economic strain on welfare systems (Lamb 2000; Brijnath 2014; Amrith 2018; Samanta 2021; Gangopadhyay 2021). Media and policy discourses have also popularized metaphors such as the silver tsunami, reinforcing a sense of impending demographic and economic disaster. This framing tends to flatten the diversity of ageing experiences, particularly in the Global South, where cultural values and kinship systems shape elderhood in ways that do not map neatly onto Western assumptions. The central concept in Calling Family is ‘transnational care collectives’, which Ahlin defines as sociomaterial configurations of people, technologies, money and emotions that collaboratively enact care across distance. Drawing on long-term participant observation, digital ethnography and sustained engagement with migrant nurses and their families, Ahlin argues that physical distance does not inevitably diminish care. Instead, care is enacted differently, through digital communication platforms such as WhatsApp, Talkray and Skype, through remittances, and through coordinated long-distance decision-making. This is very similar to what Ranganathan et al. (2025) calls ‘making things work, practically’ in the intellectual disability context where the support system often emerges from practical contexts and requirements of everyday care and from caregivers’ motivations to make things work. The book is organized into two main parts. Part One, ‘Mapping Landscapes’, situates the research in relation to STS and material semiotics, challenging the binary distinction between formal and informal care, and between human and technological actors. The chapter ‘Enacting Care’ offers ethnographic depth, detailing how migrant nurses use mobile apps not only to check in on their parents but also to meaningfully participate in health care decisions and emotional support from afar. Part Two, ‘Caring Through Transnational Collectives’, examines the dynamics within these care collectives in greater depth. One of the most compelling discussions is in the chapter ‘Shifting Duties’, where Ahlin explores how the economic agency of migrant daughters disrupts patrilineal caregiving norms in Kerala. Traditionally, daughters are expected to prioritize their husband's family after marriage. However, the remittances sent by these migrant nurses to their natal households alter the moral and economic balance, enabling them to maintain strong caregiving roles for their parents. Ahlin's ethnography also widens the scope of care beyond the immediate family. Transnational care collectives include siblings, neighbours, shopkeepers and even local technicians who help elders navigate technological devices. These networks are not fixed; they are fluid, collaboratively formed through routines of communication, digital oversight and ethical negotiation. This insight challenges the persistent assumption that ‘real’ care requires physical presence. As Ahlin points out, proximity is no guarantee of good care, and conversely, digital care can sometimes be more reliable, responsive and emotionally sustaining than co-residential arrangements. A recurring and poignant theme is the irony that migrant nurses provide hands-on, physical care to strangers in host countries while being able to offer only virtual care to their own ageing parents. The emotional toll of this separation is palpable, particularly for women who may live alone abroad for years, their own need for emotional support often unacknowledged in public narratives about migration. Ahlin's sensitivity to these tensions makes the book not only ethnographically rich but also emotionally resonant. Theoretically, Calling Family engages with and extends key debates on the gendered burden of care work, the moral hierarchy of ‘real’ versus mediated care, and the distinction between formal and informal caregiving. Ahlin challenges these dichotomies by showing that professional caregivers, nurses in this case, perform deeply personal and intimate care for their own families as well, even from a distance. By framing care as an emergent, negotiated and technologically mediated practice, she brings digital devices into the analytical frame not merely as tools but as active participants in the caregiving process. From a methodological standpoint, the book exemplifies the strengths of multi-sited ethnography. Ahlin's fieldwork in Kerala and Oman, combined with her use of digital interviews and online observation, allows her to trace care practices across national borders and technological platforms. This design captures the simultaneity of care, how actions in one location (e.g. sending remittances, video calling to monitor health) are embedded in and dependent on activities in another. While the empirical focus is on Syrian Christian nurses from Kerala, the book's theoretical contributions travel well beyond this context. For scholars of Punjab, for instance, where patterns of migration to Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia are widespread, Ahlin's conceptualization of transnational care collectives offers a valuable lens. It prompts questions about how similar dynamics might play out in a different religious, linguistic and kinship setting, and how technologies are similarly or differently enrolled in sustaining elder care. Calling Family is also significant for its refusal to pathologize distance. In the absence of physical care, it is the digitally mediated care that helps in offering help. Weather digital care should be seen as a limitation remains debated. Although some scholars point out its shortcomings in comparison to embodied, hands-on assistance, others emphasize that it fills the gaps caused by a lack of physical care and reflects shifting societal structures, making it an essential practice in the here and now. Too often, both policy discourse and popular media equate migration with neglect of elders. Ahlin's ethnography reveals a far more complex reality: one in which care is not absent but differently configured; not diminished but re-imagined through new channels. In doing so, she provides a counterpoint to the crisis narratives that dominate public conversations about ageing in migration-affected communities. Future research could extend current research on transnational digital elder care by investigating the means in which new multi-modal anthropological techniques, social robots and AI technologies influence the way that care is provided. In conclusion, Calling Family is a methodologically rigorous, beautifully written and theoretically rich contribution to the anthropology of care, migration and ageing. By bringing together STS insights with ethnographic attention to everyday life, Ahlin challenges conventional understandings of caregiving, intimacy and presence. She demonstrates that care is not bound to co-residence but can be enacted meaningfully and sometimes more effectively across vast distances. For researchers, teachers and students working at the intersections of ageing, gender, health, technology and migration, this book offers both conceptual clarity and ethnographic inspiration.

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