The negotiation of migration decisions within the families of post-accession mobile workers from Poland and Romania in Sweden is explored through the concept of family obligations. This study departs from Finch's (1987) and Mason's (1996) seminal works, which identified a wide range of supportive (and non-supportive) exchanges and negotiated commitments within families and their kin. Drawing on Mason's (1996) definition of care as both sentient activity and active sensibility, we seek to understand how migrant parents negotiate their migration decisions as an act of care and responsibility, but also as morally imbued obligations in relation to their children. As an analytical tool, the lifeline method (Davies, 1996) is used to capture key moments and events shaping the migration decisions of European workers' families, which include their motivations to pursue migration, the gendered patterns of care shaping their migration decisions, and moral reasoning over what is the right thing to do in relation to caring for their children. The analysis shows that mobile families' decisions to migrate are 'livelihood strategies' involving complex and dynamic negotiations over the options and resources of entire families and their kin across generations and transnational locations. While reflecting on their decisions over time, both migrant parents express their genuine involvement in caring responsibilities. However, the actual practice shows that caring is still a gendered activity. Finally, the decision to migrate shows that migration itself can be seen as an act of relational and emotional caring involving moral reasoning, feelings and thoughts through which migrant parents negotiate their "good parenthood".
This article draws from a broader research project Transnational childhoods, illuminating the agency and experiences of children and young people migrating from Poland and Romania to Sweden under the age of 18. Focusing on young people born in Poland and having social relationships post-migration as central theoretical component, the article explores the role that the Polish Catholic community in Sweden plays in the lives of young Polish migrants. It does so by grounding the analysis on 23 qualitative interviews, combined with network maps and life-lines, produced by the young Polish participants. The study identifies three important dimensions in the role of the Polish Catholic community. These are comprised of the community's role for young Poles' spiritual development and religious identity, for building new friendships and making sense of common migration and religious experiences, and guidance by specifically Polish Catholic priests in the young migrants' family relationships and in future life projects. The article concludes that while practicing religion and building significant social relationships within the Polish congregations the young migrants shape feelings of belonging and inclusion, however primarily within the limits of their own ethnic community. Further research is needed on the wider implications of primarily mono-ethnic relational practices for the young Poles' lives within the increasingly ethnically heterogeneous Swedish society.
The migration of Mexicans to the United States of America (USA) has traditionally drawn the interest of researchers from different disciplines, proving its multidimensional spectrum, and thus far, different perspectives ranging from legislative accounts to labour and economy have been covered. However, other social dimensions, such as sexuality, have been significantly understudied, and as new fields of migration research-such as sexual migration-emerge, new questions (should) reshape the research agenda. Héctor Carrillo, a Professor of Sociology and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Northwestern University, IL, USA, attempts-with this book-to contribute to the systematic research on sexual migration in this particular geographic area. He has expertise in the fields of sexuality, migration and health promotion, especially in the innovative cross-disciplinary research that combines the intersected implications of the aforementioned fields of research. Pathways of Desire: The Migration of Mexican Gay Men constitutes a book that is both shaped by and shapes the current research agenda and could rightly be perceived as a collective fruit of Carrillo's long-standing research efforts. The multiple goals of this book, as the author claims, revolve around the exploration of the social, cultural and political strands of the complex web of sexual migration, as perceived and narrated by the sexual migrants. Consequently, Carrillo is interested in holistically examining the pre-migration phase, especially their sexual life back in Mexico and the construction of the dream of sexual freedom. Thereafter, he explores their pathways, the migration process itself, in order to study how their migration was initiated and completed. Ultimately, he is interested to study their post-migration experiences and whether they have eventually found the life prospects they were dreaming of. Carrillo's research site is San Diego, the most developed USA-Mexico border city with a visible and well-organised gay community (p. 11). He has managed to obtain interestingly diverse qualitative data through his interviews of Mexican gay and bisexual male migrants, as well as American Latinos and white men. This methodological decision provides him with the privilege of drawing safer and more grounded comparisons and bipartite analyses of both the migrants' as well as the BOOK REVIEWS
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