The New Geographies of Care: Mapping Platform Care Circuits

Geographers have made vast contributions to the care scholarship—focusing on the spatial organization of unwaged and waged care work. This has included addressing the commodification of care, and the private home as a contested, complex workplace. Nonetheless, the care geographies literature has yet to substantively explore the growing role of platforms in mediating care exchanges. This article redresses this gap by exploring how on-demand care platforms are (1) interacting with historic racial and migrant divisions of reproductive labor, and (2) generating new, variegated geographies of care in urban centers. It finds that platforms are opening up new migrant care circuits—which I call platform care circuits. Drawing on more than thirty interviews with London-based workers using the on-demand childcare app Bubble, this article asks these questions: Who is working on these care platforms, where do they come from, and how do they get there? What segment of the domestic work economy are these platforms capturing, and what are the social differentiation processes creating these caring workforces? In mapping pathways into on-demand platform care and bringing emerging scholarship on platforms and migration into the purview of geographers, this article contributes to the geography scholarship both on care and on platform work. In turn, it asks geographers to build beyond masculine-biased geographies of app-based work still dominating the discipline.