Enacting Transnational Family Lives in Temporary Labour Migration Flows

In migration regimes regulating temporary labour migration, there exists a lack of attention to transnational family separation and ties across temporal and spatial borders and to the reconciliation of work and family life. In such a transnational division of labour, there is an increasing contradiction, especially for women, between the expanded power of market sources and the capacities for socially reproductive labour in the context of spatial displacement. Furthermore, the increasing complexity of temporally and spatially bounded migration is illustrated by the lived experiences of migrants and their families. Using examples of temporary/circular migration and the posting of workers from the countries of the former Yugoslavia to the EU, the aim of the paper is to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of transnational families and to show how transnational family arrangements are embedded in institutional contexts of temporary and precarious forms of migration. Selected features of labour migration, such as employer-bound contracts, recruitment opportunities, and the temporal dimension of temporary migration programmes, and their effects on transnational family life are examined using the example of the former Yugoslav countries. How do family boundaries change in such families and what are the most common practices in enacting ‘transnational family lives’ will be among the main questions of the paper. We analyse the exclusion and inclusion of family issues in policy discourses on migration, which often overlook the micropolitics of gender and generation, and suggest ways to better integrate a transnational family perspective into national and international policies on temporary migration in EU and regional contexts.