Exploring and understanding relationships between migration, social protection, and doing family in transnational settings is highly relevant to both the academic world and the policymaking domain. Although transnational families (TNFs) are not a new phenomenon, they have gained academic interest only in recent decades. Increasingly, the concept is also appearing in public and political debates, together with discussions on challenges and opportunities associated with that. Research works which target one and/or the other domain are at the core of this call for papers.
TNFs reflect critical social, economic, and political aspects of globalisation, separate from, but still linked to, the concept of “migrant families”. The shift from migrant families to TNFs can be seen as a reconceptualisation of migration as an “uprooting” life event to the idea that migrants maintain ties to their home societies in many ways (Glick Schiller et al., 1995). Transnational social protection, understood as the aggregate of remittances and transnational care practices (Boccagni, 2017), is critical in how leavers and stayers of the TNFs negotiate and maintain mutual obligations across time and space (Baldassar et al., 2007; Wright, 2012). Transnational social protection practices include relationships cultivated over distance, resources being circulated, visits, and time spent together along with other context-specific factors that shape transnational care (Boccagni, 2017; Baldassar and Merla, 2014; Kilkey and Merla, 2014). While studying such practices is often challenged by issues of limited visibility, multi-sited developments, and strong variations over the migrant life course, it is of crucial importance as it helps outline migrant households’ potential to bridge the gap between mobile social needs and static services and provisions (Boccagni, 2017, p.174-175). In doing so, transnational families (re)invent and practice ‘doing family’ in transnational contexts and the nature and frequency of these activities have the potential to bond families across borders.
TNFs defined as “families that live some or most of the time separated from each other, yet hold together and create something that can be seen as a feeling of collective welfare and unity, namely familyhood, even across national borders” (Bryceson & Vuorela, 2002) have been acknowledged as an important societal actor in sending, transit, and receiving countries. This special issue employs a broad perspective on TNFs, which goes beyond concerns on families from lower social classes/disadvantaged contexts, exploring issues related to a wide range of TNFs’ realities that cut across social class, reasons for migration, and geographical distribution. Part of this collection will be manuscripts that explore and provide further insights and understanding of the nexus between migration, social protection and doing family in transnational settings such as families that are geographically dispersed due to economic migration (including migrant domestic workers, caregivers, and seasonal workers) or forced migration (including refugees for political, war or climate reasons, unaccompanied minors and persons trafficked across international borders); families in which a member works abroad almost continuously (including fly-in-fly-out, frequent flyer and expatriate families); families dispersed across different countries after marriage or divorce; families in which a (mostly) young person lives abroad for a longer period for study or internship; families in which (mostly) the older generation migrates for life-style reasons to, for example, warmer places, the so-called “sunset” migrants (Baldassar et al., 2016).
Keywords: Migration, Transnational families, Family policies, Integration, Inclusion, Social Protection, Transnational Care, Doing family
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