Although the “mobility turn” has captured the critical imaginations of researchers studying an array of topics, its possible contributions to analyses of the spectrum of employment-related geographical mobility have only begun to be defined. Studies of work have engaged with the growing body of mobility theory in limited ways; by the same token, mobilities studies have taken a somewhat narrow and sometimes uncritical view of work, labor, and employment. This article draws on a major interdisciplinary research project into the socio-historical patterns, contexts, and impacts of employment-related geographical mobility in Canada to build a conceptual bridge between these two literatures. We re-visit established bodies of work on migration, work, and political economy and look at new avenues for conceptualizing employment-related geographical mobility. We then examine a case study from the Alberta Oil Sands and suggest an agenda for future research on mobility and work.

The transnational, transracial adoption of children provides the opportunity to explore how race binds and differentiates kinship and national belonging, especially when considered in relation to options for adopting both at home and abroad. More specifically, the reasons white parents give for choosing to adopt from China reveal how the normative white, American family is constructed through discourses of foreign and domestic, Asian and black. I explore three themes that contribute to the relative desirability of adopting Chinese children: they are seemingly unfettered by attachments, racially "flexible," and readily constructed as rescuable. In these discourses that bring Chinese children home, blackness serves as a mediating backdrop -a domestic "white noise." But China -US adoption unsettles as much as it reproduces racial stratifications; ongoing encounters with intimate relations of difference push at the boundaries of white privilege and weak multiculturalism.

This study examines the occupational health and safety experiences of migrant workers employed as live-in caregivers in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. Interviews with and surveys of caregivers identify four categories of common occupational hazards, including fatigue, psychosocial stress, physical hazards, and exposure to harassment and abuse. These hazards are systemically perpetuated, made invisible and rendered irremediable by intertwined (im)mobilities. At the macro-level, they include highly circumscribed and precarious conditions of transnational care migration such as indenturing to private and under-regulated recruiters, federal policies that tie status to employers and employment, and changeable, rule-bound pathways to permanent residency. At the meso-level, we find a volatile mix of mobilities and immobilities associated with employment in the oil economy of Fort McMurray, such as high population mobility and turnover, long work and commuting hours, and remoteness. And, at the micro-level, we find the everyday immobilities and highly circumscribed conditions and complexities of working and living with employers in private homes.

Fly-in fly-out (FIFO) work camps are built and organized to ensure that long-distance rotational workers are fed, housed, and mobilized in sync with the pressing yet unpredictable rhythms of resource extraction. Positioned thus ‘betwixt and between’ the complex relations of work and life (Johnsen and Sorensen, 2015), the work camp is a generative yet hitherto neglected example of permanent liminality (Bamber et al., 2017) and its temporalities. But what does this mean for workers? If camp does the liminal work of managing the temporal challenges of the resource-based mobility regime, how do FIFO workers experience and respond to its ‘in between’ time? Drawing on rare qualitative fieldwork in Canada’s Athabasca Oil Sands, we explain the effects of camp time—disorientation, monotony, and entrapment—and examine the temporal tactics workers deploy to manage those effects, from embracing and disrupting internal camp routines to aligning and syncing with outside and future-oriented temporalities. We argue that workers becoming ‘competent liminars’ (Borg and Söderlund, 2015) of camp time is crucial to the latter’s disciplining function. Our findings call for renewed attention to how liminal places and people mediate multiple and conflicting temporalities, especially in contexts where social time is institutionally harnessed in service of production.

This article examines the gendered circuits of care found in the fly-in fly-out arrangements of resource extraction zones. In the oil sands of northeast Alberta, Canada, tens of thousands of workers commute long distance between far-flung households and local work camps for rotations of one week or more. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted from the unique vantage point of work camps, we attend to the gendered relations and identities of care that characterize the 'stretched out' arrangements of care between camp and home. We especially address two forms of care: those aimed at helping people cope with camp life, and those aimed at caring for households at a distance. By considering both oil workers and camp staff, we highlight the gendering of the camp/commute regime as a particular geography of social reproduction and foreground the gendered identities-including mobile masculinities-that are reproduced and renegotiated in the process.