Media representations of migrant care workers in Swedish daily newspapers

This presentation will depart from the debate on migrant care workers found in the literature on international migration as well as in research on elderly care. The latter often depicts these workers as the solution to the recruitment needs that this welfare sector is facing while the former problematizes, among others, what the 'migrancy of care' entails. The presentation will depart from a project that explores the way in which ethnicity- and migration-related issues have been discussed in the media debate on elderly care in Sweden. The data is constituted of all articles published on this subject between 1995 and 2010 (all in all 118 articles have been analyzed; this presentation will primarily focus on the 56 that focus on migrant care workers). The analysis shows that ethnicity- and migration-related issues are discussed differently depending on the elderly care actor that is in focus. Care recipients with migrant backgrounds have often been described as a burden to this welfare sector while migrant care workers seem to be regarded as an asset even when their skills are being implicitly questioned. The presentation addresses, in other words, the paradoxical way in which daily newspapers ‘construct’ migrant care workers. As such, it contributes to the ongoing debate on media representations of ethnic ‘Otherness’ in general and migrant care workers in particular.