Tracing Digital Foodwork in the Transnational Family Across Southeast Asia

While increasing scholarly interest in ‘digital foodscapes’ has highlighted the politics of food‐based capitalism and the digitalisation of food in urban contexts, less attention has been paid to the everyday digital practices around foodwork in transnational households connecting migrants and their left‐behind families. The failure to account for how pervasive and intertwined the digital is in transnational families' foodwork practices presents an incomplete picture of the gender and generational dynamics that are imbricated in digital media technologies. To fill this gap, we draw on multi‐sited in‐depth interviews and visual food diaries from a study of migrant domestic workers in Singapore and their left‐behind children in the Philippines. By focusing our analytical lenses on both migrant mothers and left‐behind children, and the logics and logistics of their digital foodwork practices, we attend to three interrelated themes. First, we analyse migrant mothers' discourses and practices of foodwork in the proximate space of the homeland and the mediated space of smartphones. Next, we uncover foodwork relationality by examining how left‐behind children engage and negotiate with the mediated foodwork of long‐distance mothers and other carers. Lastly, we examine how digital foodwork in transnational families shapes the reconstitution of gendered and generational ‘transnational foodcare chains’.