The final stages of our preparation of this volume coincided with the publication of an article in the Economist entitled ‘Frequent flyers: The sad, sick life of the business traveller’ (A.W., The Economist August 17, 2015). Its authors refer to a recent study on ‘hypermobility’, which warns: ‘whilst aspects of glamorisation in regard to mobility are omnipresent in our lives, there exists an ominous silence with regard to its darker side’, such as health problems and social costs, including implications for family life and relationships. Even though the subjects of the study are members of a ‘mobile elite’, the by-now proverbial ‘one per cent’ of the global population, which is compensated for such hardships with high incomes that, among other things, enable them to buy-in services from (migrant) nannies, maids and handymen, the authors make a case for demystifying hypermobility. If, one may ask, the consequences of mobility are already harsh for the families of the ‘mobile elite’, then what about the costs for those less privileged? This is an important question to ask since mobility is neither the preserve of a global elite nor restricted to the world of business.
In this edited volume, we consider the implications of mobility beyond that small group of the ‘one per cent’, predominantly consisting of white men from the so-called Global North, circulating in the globalized world of high finance, by focusing on a more universal domain of the social world—family life. Our starting point is that in an age of migration and mobility, not only do many facets of contemporary family life take place against the backdrop of intensified movement in its various forms, but the practices of families themselves are deeply embedded in such movements. This book seeks to ‘make sense’ of the opportunities and challenges this poses for families and for academic, empirical and policy understandings of ‘family’. To do so, we adopt three key analytical lenses: a migration and mobilities lens, a global lens and a family life-course lens.
We adopt both a migration and a mobilities lens to better capture, firstly, the different spatial scales across which contemporary family life is stretched, and secondly, the different rhythms of movement implicated in the doing of families across spaces. There is by now a large body of scholarship within migration studies on how international migration affects the formation, practices and experiences of families across the globe. This is typified by research on transnational families, examining on the one hand, families in which parents (predominantly mothers)1 and children are physically separated because migrating parents left their children in the country of origin (a poor country) due to constraints in the receiving country (a rich country) environment, such as restrictive migration policies and precarious labour market positioning (e.g. Abrego 2014; Dreby 2010; Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997; Kilkey et al. 2014; Lutz and Palenga-Möllenbeck 2012; Mazzucato et al. 2015; Parreñas 2001), and on the other hand, families from the Global North2 in which migrant adult children are separated from elder kin members who have remained in the ‘home country’ (e.g. Baldassar et al. 2007; Baldock 2000; Bryceson and Vuorela 2002; Gardner and Grillo 2002).3 As reviewed thoroughly by Michaela Schier (Chap. 3), there is also a parallel body of scholarship within demography and family studies, examining families within single nation states, which are impacted by the division of households due to parental separation on the one hand (Ahrons 1979; Haugen 2010; Schier 2015; Smart et al. 2001; Stewart 2007) and job-related mobility on the other (Bergström Casinowsky 2013; Hardill and Green 2003; Reuschke 2010; Schneider and Collet 2010).
In this book, we use the concept of multi-local families to unsettle the division between those bodies of scholarship—the first focused on international migration, the second on internal mobility—inviting consideration of the commonalities and differences between the experiences of families separated by distance across diverse spatial scales. A multi-locality perspective, however, also requires a troubling of the international and the national. In respect of the former, and as is demonstrated in a number of the chapters in this volume, it requires us to take account of the cross-national movement of persons that occurs without the presence of border controls; this is uniquely relevant to the European context where European Union (EU) citizens have freedom of movement (FOM) rights between EU Member States. In respect of the latter, a multi-locality perspective illuminates transregional and intra-communal movements, scales that are particularly important in nation states with federal and or local systems of governance.
In addition to capturing different scales, combining migration and mobilities also captures different rhythms of movement within which contemporary practices around family life are embedded. Thus, while migration is commonly understood as an enduring and long-term movement (in official statistics, migration relates to a movement that lasts at least one year), mobilities also incorporate moves which are more fleeting and short term. Including the latter invites us to focus, among other things, on how family for some people is constituted through the practice commonly referred to as ‘reproductive tourism’—a growing phenomenon (Inhorn and Gürtin 2011), but one which is rarely considered at the nexus of migration and family studies.
We also adopt a global lens on family life in an age of migration (Castles and Miller 2009) and mobility (Urry 2007). This entails at its most basic, casting our geographical net wide to incorporate analysis of a range of societies. Thus, in relation to Europe, we include case studies from the East and West, as well as the North and South, and beyond Europe, we focus on India, Philippines, South Korea, USA and Australia. Some of those countries rarely appear in volumes, originating in Europe and North America, but as is demonstrated by Kim and Kilkey (Chap. 7), who focus on the social reproductive role of marriage migrants in South Korea, their inclusion can yield fresh insights for predominantly ‘Western’ theoretical frames. A global perspective also requires situating examination of the meanings of migration and mobility for family life within an understanding of global interdependencies and inequalities. While the perennial divisions along the North–South global axis are critical here, the volume highlights some important nuances. Thus, the chapter by Pande (Chap. 6), for example, reveals how international migration has contributed to the creation of an Indian middle-class diaspora in the USA, whose relative wealth compared to their immobile co-nationals, positions them as major consumers of commercial surrogacy services ‘back home’ in India. In addition to divisions between the so-called Global North and South, the chapter is also attuned to relationalities within the Global North and South, as well as within countries in each of those world regions. The significance of regional, as opposed to global, geographical inequalities, and the inflection of geopolitical inequalities with other social divisions including gender, social class, age and migrant status are points collectively captured in the chapters by Palenga-Möllenbeck and Lutz (Chap. 10), Gavanas and Calzada (Chap. 11) and King and colleagues (Chap. 12), which highlight such divisions within the EU.
Our third and final lens is that of the family life-course. This brings, first of all, another aspect of temporality into migration studies, a field which is predominantly concerned with spatial aspects. As has been stated elsewhere, research on family migration cannot succeed without adopting an intergenerational, life-course perspective that takes different life stages of individuals into consideration (King et al. 2006). A family life-course perspective has micro and macro dimensions (Griffiths et al. 2013). On the micro level, there is the subjectivity of time or, more specifically, its relational and emotional dimensions. On the macro level, there is the role of states in the social management of time, for example, through policies that deny or grant individuals access to a certain legal status according to certain time frames.
An understanding of migration and mobility as dynamic processes includes an acknowledgement that such dynamism is present within each stage of the family life-course as well as across the different stages, an observation that becomes apparent in the chapter by Gavanas and Calzada, which explores the experiences of Swedish retirement migrants in Spain through the lens of ageing. As Wall and Bolzman (2014: 62) argue, migration and mobility processes need to be seen ‘in relation to contextual factors such as life conditions, inequalities or migration policies’, which are also rarely static. Thus, the meanings of family life in an age of migration and mobility are examined in many of the chapters in this volume against the backdrop of wider social change, including in the realms of technology, politics, economics, demography, social policies and migration law.
Secondly, a family life-course perspective invites us to use the concept of social reproduction—the production and reproduction throughout the life course of people as physical and social beings (Kofman and Raghuram 2015). This incorporates, on the one hand, family building through relationship formation and procreation, and on the other hand, the ongoing care required in the maintenance of people on a daily and intergenerational basis. In other words, ‘it entails taking account of how families are formed, procreate and care over time’ (Kilkey 2013: no page number). Following Kofman (2012), we argue that putting social reproduction at the centre of analysis leads us to examine a range of migration and mobility circuits, including ones that are often dealt with by separate bodies of scholarship. As Kofman argues (2012: 144), ‘[R]eproduction takes place not just through labor processes and clear-cut economic migration, but also through other circuits of migration such as marriage, which create new families as well as the reunification of existing ones.’ This volume examines how reproductive and social reproductive aspects of family life are increasingly mobile, in terms of where they take place and who does them, across four stages of the family life-course—biological reproduction, relationship formation (i.e. marriage), childrearing during working life and finally, ageing. Thus, chapters focus on issues such as international reproductive tourism, transnational parenting, ‘mail order brides’ and ‘sunset migration’. Our intention is to develop understanding of the continuities and discontinuities between each stage in their underlying processes and implications for the (re)configuration of family life.
In examining the intersection between migration/mobility and family life, this volume pays particular attention to the policy and legal contexts at subnationa...