JS-65
Transnational Care in the Immobility Regime: Families Facing Closed Borders and Restrictive Migration Policies
RC06 Family Research
Language: English
Motivated variously by a desire to assert their nation-state sovereignty, to protect their labor markets and welfare states, and to exclude the 'terrorist' or racialized 'other', governments are responding to mobile populations with the policies and rhetoric of ‘closure, entrapment and containment’ (Shamir, 2005). Where do care and family relations fit in such processes is a question of fundamental importance.
Family relations and solidarities play a central role in all stages of people’s migration journeys, from the specification of migratory plans to processes of long-term settlement and, eventually, return. Members of transnational families are connected across space and time through their engagement in processes and practices of ‘care circulation’ (Baldassar and Merla, 2014), which can offer informal sources of social protection. But restrictive migration policies can seriously hinder their capacity to meet their family duties.
We welcome papers that:
- Examine the circulation of care within refugee journeys (including how care responsibilities are implicated in decisions to start, stop, stay, move on, settle, return);
- Interrogate the treatment of care within 'immobility regimes' (Turner, 2007) (including regimes undergoing significant change, such as the UK in the context of 'Brexit', and those characterized by a more generalized restrictionist drift)
- Examine the implications for how transnational families (re)configure care arrangements in the context of immobility regimes;
- Contribute to a political agenda that addresses the marginalization of care within migration regimes, for example by re-evaluating the economic costs and contributions of caring by taking into account transnational flows of care
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