Between Time Zones and Generations: A Narrative Exploration of Transnational Digital Caregiving and Intergenerational Communication

Abstract

This article offers a narrative autoethnographic analysis of transnational digital caregiving within a Turkish family based in Norway, with an 83-year-old grandmother living in Istanbul, Turkey. Focusing on everyday mediated interactions among the grandmother experiencing cognitive decline, her adult daughter caregiving at a distance, and a thirteen-year-old grandson, the study examines how care is enacted, distributed, and emotionally sustained through routine video calls. Rather than approaching caregiving primarily as a set of tasks or crisis-driven responsibilities, the analysis attends to ordinary interaction through which presence and relational continuity are negotiated across distance and generations. Analytically, the article foregrounds the uneven distribution of emotional labor within this triadic relationship. While the adult daughter experiences transnational caregiving as emotionally heavy and morally saturated, shaped by responsibility, monitoring, and guilt, the grandson engages in care through play, humor, and companionship. His playful exchanges and improvised “memory games” function as relational practices that preserve dignity and affective presence without framing cognitive decline as deficit or failure. Positioned between these two modes of care, the grandmother actively participates in sustaining interaction through humor, repetition, and everyday ritual. By situating these mediated encounters within cultural norms of Turkish family life and scholarship on digital co-presence, intergenerational communication, and dementia narratives, the article highlights humor and play as communicative resources that remain under-examined in caregiving. It demonstrates that digital technologies do not merely compensate for physical absence but actively reshape who can care, how care is expressed, and which forms of presence remain emotionally sustainable in transnational family life.