Key developments and future prospects in the study of transnational families

Abstract

Today, the terminology of transnational families is common in research, and increasingly appears in public and political debates as well (e.g., COFACE 2012). This term is, however, relatively new, and its use both reflects and supports a wider shift in migration studies that began at the turn of the Millennium and that has been called the 'transnational turn'. During the mid-1990s, and based on the observation that family members regularly engage in transnational practices across national borders, anthropologists Linda Basch, Nina Glick-Schiller, and Cristina Szanton-Blanc proposed a reconceptualisation of the dominant representation of migrants as 'uprooted' from their country of origin; rather, they advocated conceiving of migrants as 'transmigrants' who maintain multiple links and connections with their home societies (Basch et al. 1994;Glick Schiller et al. 1992;Schiller et al. 1995). Their approach was widely endorsed by migration scholars, and inspired a wave of social and political science research highlighting the importance of economic, cultural, political, religious, and social transnational dynamics (Vertovec 2009) and transnational social fields that connect sending and receiving societies (Levitt and Glick Schiller 2007;Levitt and Jaworsky 2007). Transnationalism in this context is defined as 'a social process in which migrants establish social fields that cross geographic, cultural, and political borders' (Glick Schiller et al. 1992, p. ix). Thus, migration is no longer conceived of as a one-way movement from one country to another, and national belonging is no longer seen as an either-or scenario. This conceptualisation has been further fuelled by the development and democratisation of transportation and communication technologies. These technologies have (under certain conditions) facilitated mobility and connectedness, which can be seen as another transformation that has simultaneously led to what has been coined the 'mobility turn' in social sciences (Sheller and Urry 2006;Urry 2000Urry , 2007.Although, as Vertovec (2009, p. 61) noted, '[t]he provenance of most everyday migrant transnationalism is within families', familial transnational practices had been largely neglected in mainstream transnationalism scholarship, which considered them as 'weak' forms of transnational engagement, as opposed to the 'stronger' forms that take place in the 'public' sphere (Gardner and Grillo 2002;Legall 2005). In this context, feminist scholarship has played a key role in illuminating the issue of female migration, and in bringing the topic of family migration onto the centre stage (Parreñas 2000). This scholarship challenged the then common bias in migration studies that characterised men as drivers of migration and women as followers. These studies showed that large numbers of women from the Global South migrate alone to the Global North in pursuit of better economic prospects, and highlighted how the absence of mothers can pose challenges for their non-migrant children and wider communities. The term