Migration Roundtables: Intimate Relationships, Family Ties and Other Migration Topics

The debate on care-related obligations, attitudes and practices has embraced the entire life course of (in)voluntary migrants. However, it has not yet systematically addressed a "temporally displaced" form of care that is also widespread, and rich in experiential and analytical value: the rituals, practices and infrastructures whereby the dead with a migration background are mourned, memorialized, and cared about by the living over time. Practices as diverse as attending to burial or commemoration sites (including virtual ones), writing, thinking or praying about the dead, holding public gatherings and doing artworks to commemorate them can meaningfully be explored and compared across (im)migration settings. These grassroots initiatives may be inscribed in deep-seated ways of mourning and commemoration that assert continuity and intergenerational ties within migrant or diasporic collectives. However, they become more salient when migrants die "out of place"; that is, away from the loved ones or, more radically, from public knowledge and awareness, whenever people disappear in high-risk migration routes and leave no certainty of their deaths. While being meaningful in itself, research on posthumous care in migration illuminates the boundaries of kinship and solidarity, of collective memory, of cultural or religious recognition, and ultimately of the rights of (and obligations to) the "others" in death, as much as in life. We invite contributions across these research fields, at the intersection with migration, based on fieldwork on/with family members and solidarity initiatives for those who lost their lives as migrants.