In this paper I explore the emotions of "missing" and "longing" as integral (though not essential) features of the kin-work (di Leonardo) and emotional labour (Hochschild) needed to maintain ...transnational family relationships. I argue that these emotions manifest in at least four key ways: discursively (through words), physically (through the body) as well as through actions (practice) and imagination (ideas). Hence, I consider emotions through both of the dominant perspectives in theories of emotion - constructionism (with its emphasis on discourse) and embodiment (with its emphasis on sensory experience). Drawing on a sample of Italian migrants living in Australia and their ageing parents living in Italy, I argue that the emotions of missing and longing motivate kin to construct four types of shared (co)presence - virtual, proxy, physical and imagined - which reinforce the sense of family closeness that characterises Italian conceptions of health and well-being.
This paper examines the crisis of acute and chronic illness, death, and dying in transnational families. These are the stages in the family life-course when physical co-presence is required to ...deliver hands-on care and intimate emotional support for the sick family member. It is a time when distant kin feel they need 'to be there', including for their own sense of well-being. This period of 'crisis' (in the anthropological sense) makes visible all of the impediments to transnational family caregiving that often remain hidden during those periods when 'routine' forms of distant care are adequate. Of particular relevance are the macro-level factors generated by national borders and the policies that define them, including those that govern employment, travel, visa, health, and aged care provisions. It is in these family life phases of crisis that nation-state structures can work to constrain individual agency and rights, making compellingly evident the growing need for transnational structures and policy. At issue are the largely invisible (in a policy sense) but increasingly common micro-level responses of family and individuals that characterize 'crisis distant care', which are characterized by the urgent need to visit and to intensify use of ICTs. The paper examines the experiences of migrants living in Australia who are trying to care for acutely unwell family members abroad.
In this article, we contrast the digital kinning and digital homing practices of PRC Chinese transnational grandparents in Australia from two migration cohorts. Our case studies demonstrate that ...these digital practices form an integral part of the ability to anticipate aging futures. This “digital anticipation” not only helps to safeguard and affirm social and cultural identities that are often at risk as people age in migrant settings, but also provides the potential to imagine either a future return to China that involves physical separation from children and grandchildren, or, conversely, a future lived in Australia while still maintaining connection and participating digitally in affective economies that extend beyond the nuclear family to encompass siblings, friends, and lifelong workmates. Here the role of facilitated digital access is highlighted as a form of care that can be provided by younger generations.
The experiences of ageing for today's older people present a striking contrast to those of the past. They are entering older age in a world that is characterised by complex mobilities and flows, in ...which large numbers of people are ageing in countries other than the one in which they were born and often at a distance from their closest family members. At the same time, new media are providing unprecedented opportunities to bring distant places and people together in new ways. These dramatic shifts are transforming the context within which older people provide and receive care. In this article, we argue that it has become both necessary and urgent for researchers and practitioners of ageing to reconsider their emphasis on the proximate care networks of older people, by incorporating closer attention to the increasingly global, transnational and virtual contexts within which ageing and aged care now routinely takes place.
This paper argues for a renewed research agenda on the transnational mobility of young people across both youth studies and migration studies. We review key literature across these fields, before ...arguing for a new conceptual framework that helps to further extend the emerging interdisciplinary space of 'youth mobility studies' (Raffaetà, Baldassar and Harris 2016). Our central proposition is that mobility has become an important marker and maker of transitions for youth in many contexts globally. We argue that a conceptual advance is required to understand the unique circumstances of a generation 'on the move' as they navigate diverse and non-sequential social, civic and economic practices of 'adulthood', and propose the conceptual framework of mobile transitions as a timely new agenda. 'Mobile transitions' describes transition pathways under conditions of mobility but also emphasises two key claims around the further development of transnational youth mobility research. The first is the importance of an orientation towards spatio-temporal complexity, multiplicity and fragmentation of both 'youth transition' and 'migrancy' as scholarly concepts and lived experiences. The second is an argument for understanding 'mobile transitions' in relation to three intersecting domains - economic opportunities, social relations and civic practices - rather than through linear notions of the achievement of economic and social autonomy.
In recent years, research on higher education has increasingly examined the realities of internationalisation, with a particular focus on international students' experiences and internationalisation ...at home programs. These studies have explored the friendships of international students, including their relationships with both locals and internationals from other countries. However, local students' perspectives and experiences of friendship are largely absent from this literature. The few accounts examining local students' lives explicitly focus on improving their cross-cultural knowledge and engagement, or on rare cases of local-international student friendships. The overriding assumption in this literature is that the understandings and social practises of local students are major barriers to their relationships with internationals. This paper addresses this gap by exploring local students' perspectives on the absence of friendships with their international peers. We utilise findings from a research project on internationalisation at home, involving interviews and focus groups with local and international students and staff at an Australian university. Focusing on locals' discussions of potential friendships with internationals, we propose that these missing friendships are an important area of study. We find that these friendships are missing for several interrelated reasons: local-international friendships are considered unnecessary and are therefore unimagined by locals, who tend to assume that similarity and affinity naturally lead to friendships, and the structures and spaces that might facilitate friendships are absent. Ultimately, uncovering why these friendships are missing sheds fuller light on how relationships might be facilitated, potentially informing and improving universities' internationalisation initiatives. (HRK / Abstract übernommen).
Without denying the difficulties that confront migrants and their distant kin, this volume highlights the agency of family members in transnational processes of care, in an effort to acknowledge the ...transnational family as an increasingly common family form and to question the predominantly negative conceptualisations of this type of family. It re-conceptualises transnational care as a set of activities that circulates between home and host countries - across generations - and fluctuates over the life course, going beyond a focus on mother-child relationships to include multidirectional exchanges across generations and between genders. It highlights, in particular, how the sense of belonging in transnational families is sustained by the reciprocal, though uneven, exchange of caregiving, which binds members together in intergenerational networks of reciprocity and obligation, love and trust that are simultaneously fraught with tension, contest and relations of unequal power. The chapters that make up this volume cover a rich array of ethnographic case studies including analyses of transnational families who circulate care between developing nations in Africa, Latin America and Asia to wealthier nations in North America, Europe and Australia. There are also examples of intra- and extra- European, Australian and North American migration, which involve the mobility of both the unskilled and working class as well as the skilled middle and aspirational classes.
In this article, based on ethnographic research conducted in Perth, Western Australia and Madrid, Spain, we consider how community is understood and enacted for Russian-speaking migrants and its role ...in cultural (re)production. Studies often overlook the important role of struggle, contestation and power relations in everyday practices of community making. Drawing on Bourdieu’s field theory, we describe the Russian-speaking migrant community as a structured social space in which community leaders and migrant institutions compete for the right to represent the community. As a result of power differentials, contested ideas about what Russian-speaking culture is and how it should be transmitted, maintained and produced are established, (re)produced and revised. The community is perceived by its own members as disunited and/or consisting of members with whom migrants do not want to identify, forming a ‘community of unbelonging’.
Digital media are widely recognised as essential to the maintenance of transnational families. To date, most accounts have focused on the role of digital media practices as producing and sustaining ...transnational relationships, through, for example, the practices of ‘digital kinning’. In this article, we extend that body of work by drawing attention to the specific role of the emotions that are circulated through digital media interactions and practices. We use data from ethnographic interviews with older migrant adults to consider how people who fled civil wars and resettled in Australia bridge the distances between ‘here’ and ‘there’. Our analysis draws attention to the circulation of affect, arguing that it is the capacity of digital media to circulate emotions and support affective economies that gives substance to and defines the surfaces and boundaries of transnational families, and constitutes the mutuality of being that underpins familyhood at a distance.
In this article, we introduce the key themes of our Special Issue on "Transnational care: families confronting borders". Central to this collection is the question of how family relations and ...solidarities are impacted by the current scenario of closed borders and increasingly restrictive migration regimes. This question is examined more specifically through the lens of care dynamics within transnational families and their (re-)configurations across diverse contexts marked by "immobilizing regimes of migration". We begin by presenting a brief overview of key concepts in the transnational families and caregiving literature that provides a foundation for the diverse cases explored in the articles, including refugees and asylum seekers in Germany and Finland, Polish facing Brexit in the UK, Latin American migrants transiting through Mexico, and restrictionist drifts in migration policies in Australia, Belgium and the UK. Drawing on this rich work, we identify two policy tools; namely temporality and exclusion, which appear to be particularly salient features of immobilizing regimes of migration that significantly influence care-related mobilities. We conclude with a discussion of how immobilizing regimes are putting transnational family solidarities in crisis, including in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, gripping the globe at the time of writing.
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