scholarly journals Introduction to the Special Issue “Transnational care: Families confronting borders”

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 393-414
Author(s):  
Laura Merla ◽  
Majella Kilkey ◽  
Loretta Baldassar
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Family Relations ◽  
Transnational Families ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Transnational Family ◽  
Current Scenario ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Refugees And Asylum Seekers ◽  
Migration Regimes

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.

scholarly journals Family lives on hold: Bureaucratic bordering in male refugees’ struggle for transnational care

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 435-454
Author(s):  
Lena Näre
Keyword(s):  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Family Relations ◽  
Institutional Context ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Transnational Families ◽  
Refugee Families ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Forced Migrants ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Migration Regimes

This article analyses practices of transnational care and the lives of male asylum seekers and refugee families in the context of increasingly restrictive border and migration regimes. Research on transnationalism, transnational families, and care among forced migrants has emphasised the importance of the institutional context in transnational care and family relations across borders. This article contributes to the extant literature by examining how bureaucratic bordering – within nation states and beyond – restricts the possibilities of refugees in providing care to their family members and reuniting. The article also examines the struggles experienced by male refugees at bureaucratic borders. These struggles reveal a central dimension to transnational care that relates to the bureaucracy of visas and residence permits. The article highlights the importance of temporality and examines how the lives of refugee families are affected by extended and bureaucratically induced waiting. The article is based on ethnographic research conducted on Iraqi and Afghan asylum seekers in Finland in 2017–2019 and focuses on three asylum seekers in particular – namely, Amal, Sajed, and Yasin.

Disconnective intimacies through social media: practices of transnational family among overseas Chinese students in Australia

2019 ◽  
Vol 173 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xinyu Zhao
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
International Students ◽  
Family Relations ◽  
Transnational Families ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Transnational Family ◽  
Use Of Social Media ◽  
Media Practices ◽  
Contemporary Chinese ◽  
Insight Into

This article investigates Chinese international students’ everyday transnational family practices through the use of social media. Specifically, the article highlights the relevance of two interlinked forms of disconnection in these students’ daily negotiations of ambivalent cross-border family relations in an age of always-on connectivity. The first form involves their disconnection from the general public via their creation of intimate spaces on social media that are exclusive to their family members. The second form involves the students detaching themselves from such intimate spaces, often temporarily, to escape and resist familial control and surveillance. I conclude the article by developing the notion of ‘disconnective intimacy’ to conceptualise contemporary Chinese transnational families. This article contributes to the literature on the transnational family by providing an insight into the micro-politics of mediated co-presence through the trope of ‘disconnective practice’.

scholarly journals Μετανάστριες οικιακές βοηθοί και “διεθνική” οικογένεια

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Κατερίνα Βασιλικού
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Immigrant Women ◽  
Family Relations ◽  
Domestic Workers ◽  
Transnational Families ◽  
Family Ties ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Transnational Family ◽  
The Family ◽  
State Of Research

<p>In this paper, there is an effort to make a<br />classifi cation of the family relations of the<br />immigrant women who come to Greece<br />from Eastern Europe and the Balkans to<br />work as domestic workers. First, we have a<br />presentation of the state of research about<br />‘transnational’ families and of the relevant<br />terminology. Then, from a biographical<br />research on these women and on the basis of<br />their testimonies we see that the separation<br />and the reunion are the two limits of<br />existence of the transnational family. Women<br />fi nd ways of keeping the family united and at<br />the same time they defi ne largely in this way<br />their identity. Finally, a categorization of the<br />family ties of immigrant women shows that<br />the relation parents-children is the more<br />decisive for the existence of the transnational<br />family.</p>

scholarly journals Logged In: Portuguese Transnational Families and Communication Technology

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Lisa Rodan
Keyword(s):  
Technological Change ◽  
Communication Technology ◽  
Transnational Families ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Transnational Family ◽  
The Uk

Up to 110,000 Portuguese a year left their homeland in the period following the implementation of Troika austerity measures. The UK was the most popular destination, with a third of arrivals now holding degrees- the highest proportion in Europe and double what it was 10 years earlier. This paper focuses on how the latest generation of transnational families use communication technology and digital networking at a time of swiftly evolving social and technological change. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork with university-educated Portuguese migrants in London aged 23-40, and with their families in Portugal, I will explore how communication technology has shaped their experiences. Employing anthropological concepts of relatedness and personhood, I will focus specifically on the changing nature of transnational living in an increasingly polarised, neoliberal world and what it means to be a Portuguese transnational family in Europe in 2017.

The Importance of Convention Status: A Case Study of the UK

2001 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Bloch
Keyword(s):  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Economic Rights ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Refugees And Asylum Seekers ◽  
Social And Economic Rights

Convention status accords refugees social and economic rights and security of residence in European countries of asylum. However, the trend in Europe has been to prevent asylum seekers reaching its borders, to reduce the rights of asylum seekers in countries of asylum and to use temporary protection as a means of circumventing the responsibility of long-term resettlement. This paper will provide a case study of the United Kingdom. It will examine the social and economic rights afforded to different statuses in the areas of social security, housing, employment and family reunion. It will explore the interaction of social and economic rights and security of residence on the experiences of those seeking protection. Drawing on responses to the crisis in Kosovo and on data from a survey of 180 refugees and asylum seekers in London it will show the importance of Convention status and the rights and security the status brings.

Queering deportability: The racial and gendered politics of lesbian anti-deportation activism

Sexualities ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 136346072110475
Author(s):  
Rachel Lewis
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Final Part ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Gendered Politics ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Refugees And Asylum Seekers

This article explores how deportability structures the experiences of lesbian refugees and asylum seekers in the United Kingdom. The first part of the article considers the racial and gendered processes through which the UK asylum system transforms lesbian migrants into detainable and deportable subjects. Part two then examines lesbian migrant protests that are emerging to contest the United Kingdom’s participation in the global deportation regime. The final part of the article discusses how deportation has become absorbed into the cycle of lesbian migration and asylum. The article concludes by calling for a feminist, queer, and anti-racist understanding of the processes through which lesbian migrant deportability is produced and experienced in 21st century Britain.

The financialisation of transnational family care: a study of UK-based senders of remittances to Ghana and Nigeria

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-156
Author(s):  
Nicola Yeates ◽  
Freda Owusu-Sekyere
Keyword(s):  
Family Relationships ◽  
Family Relations ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Family Care ◽  
Policy Implications ◽  
Transnational Families ◽  
Family Structures ◽  
Family Networks ◽  
Transnational Family ◽  
The Social

AbstractTransnational families occupy centre-stage in literatures on transformations in the social organisation and relations of care and welfare because they express how social bonds are sustained despite geographical separation. This paper examines some key themes arising from a research study into remittance-sending practices of UK-based Ghanaians and Nigerians in the light of research literatures on transnational family care and development finance. The data comprises qualitative interviews with 20 UK-based Ghanaian and Nigerian people who regularly send remittances to their families ‘back home’. This paper discusses a social issue that arises from the transnationalisation of family structures and relations, when migrant family members are positioned within family networks as ‘absent providers’, and familial relations eventually become financialised. The findings show the complexities of transnational living, the hardships endured by remittance-senders and the particular strains of remittance-mediated family relationships. The financialisation of family relations affects the social subjectivity and positioning of remittance-senders within the family. Strain and privation are integral to participants’ experiences of transnational family life, while themes of deception, betrayal, and expatriation also feature. The suppression of emotion is a feature of the significant labour inputs participants make in sustaining relationships within transnational families. The paper considers UK social policy implications of the findings.

scholarly journals Between City and Nation of Sanctuary: Examining the Political Geographies of Asylum and Hospitality in Wales

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Franz Bernhardt
Keyword(s):  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Territorial Unit ◽  
State Administration ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Refugees And Asylum Seekers ◽  
First Time ◽  
Critical Literature

In response to what has been called the European ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015, the Welsh Government committed that Wales should become the world’s first Nation of Sanctuary through building a culture of welcome and hospitality. This was an interesting moment given that Wales does not have direct responsibility for British borders. Considering the urban origins of the sanctuary movement, this was also the first-time a (devolved) state administration adopted this vocabulary to frame their relation to refugees and asylum seekers. What might it mean, in practice and in theory, for Wales to declare itself a ‘Nation of Sanctuary’? What are the theoretical and political imaginaries of sanctuary, national identity and hospitality at work in this context? What are their historical precedents? And how do they relate to political responses to the crisis across the UK and Europe? This thesis examines what the idea of a Welsh Nation of Sanctuary means, what it does, and how the discourses and narratives of a ‘Nation of Sanctuary’ provide new ways of revisiting the metaphor of hospitality, and its role in sovereign framings of migration. While the critical literature on migration and the sanctuary movement explored the limits of hospitality as a framing response to the exclusionary politics of asylum, this thesis argues that this national sanctuary discourse is also used to challenge a sovereign nation-state on the expectations of what it entails to ‘be a host’ to refugees and asylum seekers. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, archival material and documents from the Welsh and British government, this thesis argues that this new national sanctuary framing creates a second othering. Here, a subnational or devolved territorial unit creates national self-imaginaries through a politics of differentiation against the sovereign nation-state, with regards to the exclusionary politics of asylum.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document