Achieving an Adequate ‘Distant Co-Presence': Polymedia As Vibrant Matter in Transnational Family Life

Both mobility and technologies, and their intersections, need to be theorised as integral to transnational family relations. In this paper, I employ a framework of circulation (Baldassar & Merla 2013) as a methodological tool to ‘follow the thing’ that is, care, across distance and over time, as well as its intersections with various dimensions of social reproduction. I also apply Madianou and Miller’s (2012) theory of polymedia, combined with Jane Bennett’s (2010) notion of vibrant matter, to examine how communication technologies are not only sustaining, but transforming, circuits of distant care. These transformations in distant care begin to stretch the limits of some of our distinctions between proximate and distant family life, in particular through transformations in co-presence (the feeling of ‘being there’), which challenge the epistemology of intersubjectivity.