Engineering Care: Migrants and Robots Amid the Crisis of Social Reproduction in Aging Japan

With the world’s oldest population and aging labor force, Japan has been engulfed in a crisis of social reproduction, where the capitalist society struggles to sustain the institutions and relations necessary for its own regeneration. Against this backdrop of care crisis, two figures have come into the national spotlight: migrant workers and care robots. The mainstream society often pits them against one another, contrasting the threatening volatility of foreigners with the soothing predictability of robots. Yet they can be more alike than different. Both migration and mechanization effectively stretch the supply of labor power without investing in the reproduction of human workers within the country. Based on years of research about the Filipina caregivers and care technologies in Japan, Engineering Care elaborates on the concept of “boundary engineering” as a mechanism that helps exploit the migrants’ care labor as well as the big data harvested by care robotic technologies. This framework conjoins the analyses of care economy and data capitalism through a Marxist feminist lens. The book’s foci on the circulation and mechanization of care would thus appeal to interdisciplinary audience in anthropology, sociology, gender studies, migration studies, Asian studies, and science & technology studies.