« Doing » family across distance and national borders: conceptual tools for research

In order to fully understand family life, which is increasingly performed in a context of geographical mobility, and where co-residence tends to lose its centrality, researchers need to develop new conceptual tools that cross disciplinary boundaries. This conference builds on the research I have conducted over the past 10 years on the maintenance of family ties and solidarities across geographical distance and national borders. Here I will present a conceptual framework for understanding the dialectical relation between geographical distance and emotional proximity in family life (Merla, François & Jansen, 2014), that combines insights from sociology and psychology, and I will illustrate it with empirical examples from my research on transnational families