Family Life In An Age Of Migration And Mobility

In an age of migration and mobility many aspects of contemporary family life – from biological reproduction to marriage, from child-rearing to care of the elderly - take place against a backdrop of intensified movement across a range of spatial scales from the global to the local. This insightful book analyzes the opportunities and challenges this poses for families and for academic, empirical and policy understandings of ‘the family’ on a global level, including case studies from Europe, India, the Philippines, South Korea, the United States and Australia. With chapters on international reproductive tourism, transnational parenting, ‘mail-order brides’ and ‘sunset migration’, it examines the implications of migration and mobility for families at different stages of the life course. Moreover, it brings together leading international scholars to connect a fragmented field of research, and in so doing enables an interdisciplinary exchange, generating new insights for theory, policy and empirical analysis.

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.

This book brings together ten original empirical works focusing on the influence of various types of spatial mobility – be it international or national– on partnership, family and work life. The contributions cover a range of important topics which focus on understanding how spatial mobility is related to familial relationships and life course transitions. The volume offers new insights by bringing together the state of the art in theoretical and empirical approaches from spatial mobility and international migration research. This includes, for example, studies that investigate the relationships between international migration and changing patterns of partnership choice, family formation and fertility. Complementing to this, this volume presents new empirical studies on job-related residential mobility and its impact on the relationship quality of couples, family life, and union dissolution. It also highlights the importance of research that looks at the reciprocal relationships between mobility and life course events such as young adults leaving the parental home in international migration context, re-arrangements of family life after divorce and spatial mobility of the elderly following life transitions. The scholarly work included in this volume does not only contribute to theoretical debates but also provide timely empirical evidence from various societies which represent the common features in the dynamics of spatial mobility and migration.

Families on the Move addresses the questions of the role mobility continues to play in contemporary life. Although the American transition of belief in an open society and frontier is still full of vigor, concerns about the frequency, opportunity, and meaning of mobility to families have arisen. This book examines the current research on family mobility, migration, and immigration and proposes new directions for understanding the relationship between mobility and family life. It is important that today's researchers, educators, and practitioners understand the nuances of a mobile society to develop programs and policies that ease such transitions. Topics covered in Families on the Move include national and international mobility that affects families during transitional stages of life. The contributors have provided diverse research and theory that emphasizes a variety of specific populations and policy analyses. In addition to specific subcultural and historic patterns, the book addresses the process at a familial micro level. Individuals and families face increasing stress and opportunity when change arises. Relocation of one's residence my have different interpretations depending on the situation. A decision to relocate may be based on choice, or by employee transfer, crisis or a cultural phenomena. Considering how these changes affect the family and the new environment of relocation are central themes in the book. All professionals and researchers interested in family issues will want to read this book.

This Handbook is a timely and critical intervention into debates on changing family dynamics in the face of globalization, population migration and uneven mobilities. By capturing the diversity of family ‘types’, ‘arrangements’ and ‘strategies’ across a global setting, the volume highlights how migration is inextricably linked to complex familial relationships, often in supportive and nurturing ways, but also violent and oppressive at other times.

This book places family at the centre of discussions about migration and migrant life, seeing migrants not as isolated individuals, but as relational beings whose familial connections influence their migration decisions and trajectories. Particularly prioritising the voices of children and young people, the book investigates everyday family practices to illuminate how migrants and their significant others do family, parenting or being a child within a family, both transnationally and locally. Themes covered include undocumented status, unaccompanied children’s asylum seeking, adolescents' "dark sides", second generation return migration, home-making, belonging, nationality/citizenship, peer relations and kinship, and good mothering. The book deploys a wide range of methodological approaches and tools (multi-sited ethnographies, participant observation, interviews and creative methods) to capture the ordinary, spatially extended and interpersonal dynamics of migrant family lives. Drawing on a range of cross-cutting disciplines, geographical areas and diversity of levels and types of experiences on part of the editors and authors, this book will be of interest to researchers across the fields of migration, childhood, youth and family studies.

This volume documents the life uncertainties revealed by migrants’ biographies. For international migrants, life journeys are less conventional or patterned, while their family, work, and educational trajectories are simultaneously more fragmented and intermingled. The authors discuss the challenges faced by migrants and returnees when trying to make sense of their life courses after years of experience in other countries with different age norms and cultural values. The book also examines the ways to reconcile competing cultural expectations of both origin and destination societies regarding the timing of transitions between roles to provide a meaningful account of their life courses. Migration is, itself, a major life event, with profound implications for the pursuit of migrants’ life goals, organization of family life, and personal networks, and it can affect, to a considerable degree, their subjective well-being. Chapter 9 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This thoroughly revised and updated Handbook brings together an international range of contributors to highlight the deep interdependence between migration and globalisation, and explore the impact of economic, social, and political globalisation on international population flows. It provides an interdisciplinary perspective on a discussion that has been intensifying and diversifying over the past 25 years. This title contains one or more Open Access chapters.