Transnational life and cross-border immobility in pandemic times

The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically disrupted and reconfigured the cross-border movements of people. Based on an anthropological study of the experiences of transnational migrants during the pandemic (May 2020–May 2021), this article explores stories of how cross-border immobility impacts transnational life and sense of belonging. The stories reveal the emotional toll of prolonged family separation across geographical distances when loved ones are no longer ‘just one flight away’ and give voice to experiences of being ‘trapped’, ‘stuck’ or ‘stranded’ in a state of transnational limbo. Running through the stories are intensified experiences of foreignness, non-belonging, precariousness and discrimination. Some also felt abandoned by their country of origin as border closures left them ‘locked out’ and ‘blowing in the wind’, fostering an experience akin to exile.     

Fleeting joy,divergent expectations and reconfigured intimacies: The visits home of Filipino migrant care workers in Singapore

For Filipino migrant care workers in Singapore, visits home are highly anticipated and longed for, but only as long as they remain brief. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, this paper examines such visits as emotionally complex events that bring intense joy as migrants reunite with dispersed family members, but also reveal divergent expectations and feelings of loss and betrayal. These experiences are especially felt among migrant women given the gendered constructions of their migration journeys that demand strenuous relational work on their visits and far beyond. Visits home, nevertheless, are important moments through which migrant care workers re-orient their priorities and aspirations as migrants and as women over time, often leading to prolongations of their ‘temporary’ absences. The paper further examines how migrant care workers, many of whom are on temporary work contracts in Singapore, fear and anticipate the moment when short visits ultimately become permanent returns.     

Ageing,migration infrastructure and multi-generational care dynamics in transnational families

The analysis of transnational family relations from an intergenerational to a multi-generational perspective highlights the significant role migration infrastructure plays in transnational family care arrangements at different family life stages. Changing migration policies and local-bound welfare systems in the host and home countries tend to fixate the role of care-receiver and provider against fluid transnational family care dynamics as the life course of the family unfolds. This paper focuses on Chinese transnational one-child families in which the initial separation between parents and their only-child was motivated by the child's overseas education, and followed by the adult child's employment and family formation in the UK. My findings illustrate how reified definitions of the family and familial roles structure mobile individuals’ access to family rights in a transnational context. They warn of the danger of entrenched injustice embedded in the definitional classification of family migrants.     

Transnational families: The experiences of Polish stayers from a lifelong perspective

In migration research, the voice is usually given to those who move, but in this article, those who stay are at the centre of attention. The study aims to present the stayers’ practices of everyday life in transnational families in an attempt to highlight the experience of staying and understand the stayers’ role in the migration project. The study is based on semi-structured life story interviews conducted in 2020 with people who in the 1980s stayed in the northeastern part of Poland when their relatives migrated internationally. In the almost four-decade perspective, staying appears as a powerful condition and an active process, closely interrelated with migration. Also, the migration project does not appear dependent so much on the range and availability of communication technologies – limited in the 1980s – but on transnational families’ engagement in that project and desire to accomplish it.     

Visiting here,there, and somewhere: Multi-locality and the geographies of transnational family visiting

For transnational families, visits represent an opportunity to temporarily punctuate the geographical distance that separates them from significant others in everyday life. Drawing on data from mapping-interviews conducted with older skilled migrants in Abu Dhabi, the UAE, this paper is concerned with how transnational visiting is harnessed to sustain a sense of family togetherness at a later stage of the life course. The discussion contributes to migration scholarship on return visits and visits by relatives to the migration destination but also draws attention to a third dimension of visiting; family meet-ups in a third space—a location that is neither the country of origin nor the migration destination. Hence, I propose an explicitly spatial, relational conceptualization of transnational family visits, arranged around a multi-local framework: the return visit (‘there’); the receiving of visits in the migration destination (‘here’); and visits in an in-between geographical space (‘somewhere’). In so doing, this paper places the spotlight on the geographies of visiting, drawing attention to the dynamic way in which the practice of transnational family visiting in enacted in later life.     

Transnational lived citizenship turns local: Covid-19 and Eritrean and Ethiopian diaspora in Nairobi

This paper analyses how migrant community practices of transnational lived citizenship were altered by both, COVID-19 and the policy response from the Kenyan government. It is based on interviews with members of the Eritrean and Ethiopian diaspora residing in Nairobi. The paper demonstrates how policies introduced because of the pandemic caused migrant communities to lose local and remittance income. More than the loss of material resources, however, they were impacted by the elimination of social spaces that enable diaspora lives. These two dynamics have intensified a trend that may have been present before the pandemic, a local turn of transnational lived citizenship. By focusing on lived experiences and how they have been re-assessed during the pandemic, the paper argues that transnational lived citizenship is always in flux and can easily become reconfigured as more localized practices. The concept of transnational lived citizenship is demonstrated to be a useful lens for analysing shifting migrant livelihoods and belonging.     

Watching them grow: Intergenerational video-calling among transnational families in the age of smartphones

This paper investigates the novel forms of intergenerational communication in transnational families introduced by the widespread use of video-calls on smartphones. Centring on the kin-keeping role of the mother, the study analyses 30 semi-structured interviews with migrant Turkish mothers living in 10 different countries around the world, as the facilitators of video-calls and intergenerational mediators. It is argued that smartphone mediated video-calls add new dimensions to the communication that expand the possibilities of self-expression and bonding for the migrant child with their grandparents in the form of visual performance, spatial sharing and spatio-temporal longing, while offering new ways of carrying out traditional grandparenting roles in a digitalized setting. Such intergenerational communication is mediated by migrant mothers as manifested through the practice of simultaneous multigenerational communication engaging all three generations on different forms of exchange enabled by the device itself. Although the new generation born into the digital age struggle with the paradox of separation vis-à-vis virtual togetherness, everyday video-calls on smartphones not only help keep the image of ‘family’ alive for the migrant child, they also generate a circumambient virtual setting that permits the transfer of family culture, knowledge and values wherein the younger generation can learn from the parent–grandparent relationship model.     

Diaspora governance and religion: The (re)production of the Guangze Zunwang cult in the Chinese diaspora

The role of sending states receives little attention in existing studies of transnational religion; another body of literature on diaspora governance gives little scrutiny to the religious dimension of diaspora strategies. This paper attempts to bridge the two bodies of works by exploring the state-directed religious networking in the Chinese diaspora. Through a case study of the Guangze Zunwang cult, it investigates how origin states mobilize migrant religious networks for diaspora engagement and how diaspora communities respond to governing strategies. Different Chinese (non)state agents operate diasporic religious programs—international cultural tourism festivals and deities’ cross-border processions—respectively within and outside the territory. Inspired by the state-directed networking, diaspora groups also launch temple alliances in residential places, yet at the same time, produce alternative networks dedicated to revitalizing the cult. The paper sheds light on the multiplicity and flexibility of diaspora governance and provides further insights into the agency of the diaspora through transnational religious networking.     

Gateway cities for transnational higher education? Doha,Dubai and Ras al-Khaimah as regional amplifiers in networks of the ‘global knowledge-based economy’

This paper investigates how the developmental ambitions of governments to attract university offshore campuses to Doha, Dubai and Ras al-Khaimah and these universities’ internationalization strategies affect the three cities’ positionalities. It links interdisciplinary literature on globally uneven geographies of higher education to geographical debates on the intermediating role of cities in regional and global economies. The paper conceptualizes the three cities as a triadic ensemble of gateways for transnational higher education (TNE), thereby contributing to further theorization of gateway cities. The paper shows that the three cities fulfil two crucial gateway functions. First, they connect internationalizing universities with particular student segments from their regional hinterlands seeking access to TNE. Second, they thereby amplify and disperse hegemonic regimes of the globalising knowledge-based economy in their regional hinterlands. While all three cities share similar functions and rationales, they also have distinct positionalities rooted in different strategies of the respective governments.     

Overcoming interruptions in educational trajectories: Youth in Ghana with international migrant parents

Literature on the effects of parental migration on the education of children who stay at origin, what we call ‘stayer’ youth, mainly focuses on educational outcomes without looking at the process leading to such outcomes. This article addresses this gap by showing how the educational trajectories of stayer youth unfold. Stayer youth may encounter a range of obstacles and interruptions to their education when their parents move overseas, and we explore the agency these youth exert and the support networks they activate to try to overcome them. We employ a youth-centric methodology, based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in three cities in Ghana, with young people whose parents migrated internationally. We find that frequent changes in residence, limited financial means, and lack of academic support cause interruptions in educational trajectories. In response, the young people mobilize support from local social networks to compensate for what they lack from their transnational connections.