Health Mobilities and Biological Citizenship

The transnational health and social care arrangements project looks at how different transnationally mobile populations’ everyday and medical care needs are supported and met through cross-border configurations of formal (i.e., state, private and voluntary) and informal (i.e., family and community) care provision. How are home and destination countries’ diverse economic, social and political configurations being used to support these populations’ health and quality of life? And how are such practices and policies en/disabling cooperation between formal and informal care providers across borders? By examining the myriad ways in which health and social care responsibility increasingly get negotiated and distributed among different actors within and between countries, the project critically unpacks ingrained assumptions about the sources, directions, subjects and political value of care.

The project focuses on three different transnationally-mobile populations:
-International medical travellers (IMT) or 'medical tourists': With more people crossing national borders in the pursuit of health care every day, such flows serve to challenge popular assumptions about who provides and receives care since they inverse and diversify previously taken-for-granted directionalities of care;
-International retirement migrants (IRM): As the growing recruitment of foreign health, residential and domestic care workers in many rapidly-ageing countries attests, the management of elder care needs extends already well beyond national borders. This study examines another emerging yet under-explored facet of this increasingly transnational approach to redistributing elder care: older people remaining in, or relocating to, international retirement destinations as they grow more physically and economically vulnerable;
-Expatriates: Much has been written on economic migrant and refugee health issues with regard to (the barriers to) access to health care in their places of residence and of origin. However, because of their relatively privileged socio-economic and politico-legal status compared with other categories of mobile peoples, little attention has been given to expatriates' health and social care needs and experiences.