Transnational families, migration and kin-work : from care chains to care circulation

Research into transnational families, migration and kin-work is principally divided into two main areas – studies that focus on female migrant labour movement from developing to developed countries (often with long-distance mothering as the focus) characterised by the care-chain literature, and studies that examine a broader set of family mobilities between a diverse range of countries (often with elder care as a focus) characterised by the transnational families and caregiving literature. Both these areas of study tend to assume, either explicitly or implicitly, that the transnational family form is atypical, dysfunctional, ultimately unstable or unsustainable, and certainly less than ideal. The aim of this paper is to bring together the transnational families and care-chain literatures by rethinking some key underlying premises. At present the care chain literature tends to emphasise the commodification of care from a macro perspective, which is important to our understanding of the global political economy. However, it also tends to overlook the findings of more micro transnational caregiving studies that show that care can be effectively exchanged between family members across national borders and that migration does not inevitably jeopardise the family. Without denying the difficulties that confront migrants and their distant kin, we wish to highlight the agency of family members in transnational processes of care in an effort to acknowledge the transnational family as an increasingly common family form and to question the predominantly negative conceptualisations of this type of family. In summary, we are posing the contentious hypothesis that the transnational family should be theorised as a ‘normalised’ family form. Following current theorisation (or revised understandings) of the migration process as circular rather than linear, we wish to highlight that the exchange of transnational caregiving is similarly not unidirectional but rather could be re-conceptualised as a set of activities that circulates between home and host countries, across the generations as well as fluctuating over the life course. Based on ethnographic case studies, we show that care-giving includes multidirectional exchanges across generations and between genders by analysing the role of elderly people, men, children, parents, siblings and the second generation as both receivers and providers of care