How Racialised Migrant Mothers Navigate Safety and Security: Exploring Cultural Code-Switching As an Additional Consideration in the Mental Load Process

This paper positions the Mental Load framework as a critical tool to conceptualize the cognitive and emotional labor required by racialized individuals, particularly migrant mothers, to navigate concerns of safety and security in intercultural spaces. While critical race and cultural scholars have underscored the heightened vigilance that Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) must exercise to ensure their protection, these dynamics remain underexplored in the context of family and migration studies.

Drawing on Daminger’s (2019) steps of the Mental Load, this paper introduces an additional dimension: Cultural Code-Switching—the anticipatory, strategic, and continual monitoring of one's actions and environment to manage racialized concerns. This essential process involves adjusting behaviors, interpreting social cues, and responding to the perceived threats or biases in different intercultural settings.

The research is grounded in a feminist analysis of in-depth interviews with South Asian migrant mothers in Melbourne, a multicultural epicenter and key migration hub in Australia. These narratives reveal how gendered and racialized intersectionalities shape their strategies of cultural code-switching, highlighting the complexities involved in maintaining both physical and psychological safety. By doing so, the paper extends current discussions on interculturality by demonstrating how migrant mothers’ experiences of hypervigilance in navigating intercultural exchanges provide new insights into asymmetric power dynamics and strategies for survival in multicultural societies.

This study contributes to critical interculturality and decolonial scholarship by illuminating the overlooked mental and emotional burdens faced by migrant women of color, and by calling for the inclusion of such intersectional perspectives in broader conversations on interculturality.