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In many countries of the global North, families increasingly rely on live‐in caregivers to look after their children and elderly. Although much care work remains unpaid and informal, several states have set up a variety of migration and labour regimes to guarantee a steady supply of workers to provide paid live‐in care in the home. This paper contributes to a broadening of the focus of labour geography beyond “productive” labour by factoring in the theoretical perspective of social reproduction into the debates on constrained agency. Our aim is to identify the mechanisms that make these regimes function for employers and employees, and their consequences for the social reproduction of the workers. To do so we compare live‐in care schemes in the UK, Canada, Austria and Switzerland and examine the ways in which live‐in care is differentially institutionalised. Our policy analysis in these four countries shows that the constrained agency of the workers does not solely stem from their status as migrants, but is produced by the nexus of specific migration, care and gendered labour regimes. Furthermore, we argue that we need to extend our perspective beyond the immediate work context to see how live‐in care regimes not only infringe, but also enable, the social reproduction of the workers – a fact that has often been neglected by existing research.

This article explores the growing interest in care within geography. Focusing on care as waged work, we trace current transformations through commodification and digitalisation. We discuss how the private household is turning into a precarious and feminised workplace for a growing number of workers, and we show how this development is promoted by the rise of labour agencies that facilitate the transnational recruitment of care workers. The literature on global care chains illustrates how the recruitment of migrant workers fills care deficits in destination countries while opening up care gaps in sending countries. We review this literature from economic geography and beyond and reflect on the continuing feminisation and devaluation of care labour. Based on these critical insights, we examine how processes of digitalisation contribute to reshaping care work. We discuss the ambivalent effects of digital technologies on care and argue that there is an urgent need to intensify our engagement with the processes and effects of digital transformations. In our conclusions, we call for strengthening the budding debate on alternative visions of caring within geography and point to avenues for future engagement.

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Our article aims at refocusing the debate in privilege studies from tackling the invisibility to challenging justifications of gender privilege. Focusing on instances in which men acknowledge that they receive preferential treatment, this study sheds light on how privilege is perceived and talked about in interviews with men in female‐dominated occupations. In contrast to existing literature on the invisibility of privilege to the privileged, our analysis shows that the privileging of men is indeed known to them. However, our interviewees then employ specific discursive strategies to actively reframe and thereby silence privilege. They either justify privilege as an individual achievement or as a natural advantage of male bodies. In our discussion, we show how these discursive reframings build on existing discourses on gendered bodies and neoliberal subjectivity. Based on our key argument that gendered privilege is not invisible, but it is acknowledged and then actively reframed and thereby silenced, we argue for expanding the focus of privilege studies: Instead of primarily investing in making privilege visible to those who have it, we need to challenge the discourses that allow for reframing and silencing it.