family life in an age of migration and mobility

Migration,
Diasporas and
Citizenship

FAMILY LIFE IN AN AGE OF
MIGRATION AND MOBILITY
Global Perspectives through the Life Course

Edited by Majella Kilkey
and Ewa Palenga-Möllenbeck


Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship

Series Editors
Robin Cohen
Department of International Development
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
Zig Layton-Henry
Department of Politics and International Studies
University of Warwick
Kenilworth, UK


Aims of the Series
Editorial Board: Rainer Baubock, European University Institute, Italy;
James F. Hollifield, Southern Methodist University, USA; Daniele Joly,
University of Warwick, UK; Jan Rath, University of Amsterdam, The
Netherlands.
The Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship series covers three important aspects of the migration process: firstly, the determinants, dynamics

and characteristics of international migration. Secondly, the continuing
attachment of many contemporary migrants to their places of origin,
signified by the word ‘diaspora’, and thirdly the attempt, by contrast, to
belong and gain acceptance in places of settlement, signified by the word
‘citizenship’. The series publishes work that shows engagement with and
a lively appreciation of the wider social and political issues that are influenced by international migration. This series develops from our Migraton,
Minorities and Citizenship series, which published leading figures in the
field including Steven Vertovec, Daniele Joly, Adrian Favell, John Rex,
Ewa Morawska and Jan Rath. Details of publications in the series can be
viewed here: www.palgrave.com/products/series.aspx?s=MMC
More information about this series at
/>

Majella Kilkey • Ewa Palenga-Möllenbeck
Editors

Family Life in an Age
of Migration and
Mobility
Global Perspectives through
the Life Course


Editors
Majella Kilkey
Department of Sociological Studies
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK

Ewa Palenga-Möllenbeck

Department of Gender Studies
University of Frankfurt
Frankfurt, Hessen, Germany

ISBN 978-1-137-52097-5
ISBN 978-1-137-52099-9
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-52099-9

(eBook)

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Foreword

In The Seventh Man, John Berger and Jean Mohr show an uncanny photograph of a man’s face ripped diagonally in half. In the upper left, one sees
a cap, ear, eye, and nose. In the remaining right part, the other eye, ear,
and mouth. He is poorly shaved. His shirt is worn, his identity unknown.
Many Turkish guest workers put themselves in the hands of dubious
smugglers who were known to have abandoned migrants along treacherous mountainous journeys. To guard against such danger, a family would
tear the photograph of a migrant’s face in half, give half to the smuggler
and await the receipt of the other half from the migrant himself—they
were mostly men—safely arrived in France, a sign that the smuggler had
been honest and should be paid. The torn photograph is also a powerful
metaphor for many of the kinds of separation—and reunion—described
in this exciting new collection of original research-based essays.
We learn in one chapter of a ‘kind of wake’ held at a local pub in the
1890s when an Irish uncle boarded a boat for Australia. But what is the
experience of a lengthy separation today in the age of the cell phone
and Skype? Does technology join the two sides of the photograph, or
become part of the separation between them? What does the appearance
on a screen of a face known to be far away mean for the nine-million
Filipino children who live without one or both parents? How is it for the
elderly parents of migrant brides who fly to join Korean bachelors? What
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vi

Foreword

is the experience of Italian migrants in Norway, of Ghanaian workers
in Holland, of Poles in Germany and Ukrainians in Poland? And what
of elderly Swedes who become isolated, then trapped, in the beautiful
coastal villages of Spain, and elderly Albanians who follow their children to Italy? What is the experience of the children of divorced parents
frequently working at distant jobs, in different countries, who live with
a caregiver hired to stay with them in a family home in Germany? The
essays in this volume offer answers.
In doing so, they vastly expand the meaning of the term ‘work–family
balance’. As it is often used, the term carries the image of a family seated
at a common dinner table in a shared household, located in the same
town, country and continent. ‘Balance’ is imagined between an office job
and an after-school pick-up. But, for an increasing number of families
around the world, that ‘balance’ is between phone calls and remittances
to small children in the ‘Global South’ and a ten-hour job as a nanny to
other small children in the ‘Global North’.
Such new families also invite us to expand the concept of global care
chains. As the research of Rhacel Parreñas and others have shown, a
Filipina nanny may care for the children of an Italian couple in Rome. In
turn, her children may be cared for by a local nanny hired by the migrant
nanny’s mother or sister. The long hours of work of that local nanny may
require her to leave her own small children in the care of her parents
back in the distant Filipina village, or in desperate circumstances, young
children are left in the care of older ones. This volume invites us to think
of care in ecological terms. For each act of care is part of a larger pattern
of care. Who, we ask, cares for those the caregiver is responsible for caring for? Who cares, if anyone, for the caregiver herself? Can we speak of
fictive care—care which is imagined but which sadly does not actually
transpire? Can we speak of invisible care—care which is real but unrecognized? What various forms do care chains take, and at what points do
fiction and invisibility appear? Do care chains always extend from poor
countries to rich ones? Does care diminish as we move down the economic ladder? When people don’t get to live the lives they wish to live, to
what extent do they develop an imagined ‘potential self ’—the self they

would be if only they had time, if only they had money, if only they were
in one place and not another? (Hochschild, 1997).


Foreword

vii

This volume is important for its empirical richness, the ideas it generates
and the questions it invites. It is especially important attached as it is to a
moral urgency that is likely to increase in light of two trends. One is the
increase in global inequality, which will enlarge the number of people in
poor countries seeking a better life in richer ones. The other is the increase
in climate change, which is already forcing farmers from their parched
plots, and exacerbating conflict and flight. Based on such research, we can
hopefully devise ways to rejoin the separated images of loved ones and so
make a better world.
Department of Emeritus of Sociology
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA, USA

Arlie Russell Hochschild



In Commemoration of Sarah Van Walsum,
1955–2014

Sarah van Walsum was Professor of Migration Law and Family Ties at the
VU University Amsterdam. Her writings on migration law and the family

and women and migration law were also influenced by other disciplines,
such as sociology and political science. Her creative and penetrating analysis was recognized in 2011 by the award of a prestigious Vici grant of
1.5 million euros over five years from the Netherlands Organization for
Scientific Research to chart the relationship between migration, nation
and family with her own research group.
She argued that immigration law should be analyzed in relation to
other fields of law, especially family law, as well as other fields of public
policy. As she outlined in an interview, Lady Justice is not Blind, given
at the time of her inaugural lecture Intimate Strangers in June 2012,
immigration law operates within a duality which can be compared to
the representation of the world through two contrasting maps. One is
the traditional map divided into differently coloured and bounded states;
the other, as in in-flight magazines, shows the aviation routes connecting
different places across continents. She stressed that neither map was to
replace the other as a source of truth, but that the tensions between both
representations of global connections and disconnections could be the
source for alternative (legal) discourses.

ix


x

In Commemoration of Sarah Van Walsum, 1955–2014

Her work also demonstrated the legal–historical continuity between
European colonialism and contemporary European migration politics
with particular attention paid to gendered shifts over time. Probably her
best known publication was The Family and the Nation: Dutch Family
Migration Policies in the Context of Changing Family Norms, 2008. In it

she analysed the development of Dutch family migration policies through
three periods from the 1940s until 2000 (post-war reconstruction and
decolonization, debating the Dutch welfare state and reconstruction of
the welfare state) and showed how, today, as in colonial times, the moral
order as shaped by dominant norms on gender, family and sexuality
serves as a framework for inclusion and exclusion, that is, to distinguish
between those who belong and those who do not.
Sarah van Walsum’s work also pointed out how today’s family norms
are presented as modern, emancipated and egalitarian—partly as a function to keep others outside of the state’s borders. The antithesis of this
good citizen is the problematic migrant: the man or woman who sticks
to traditional, patriarchal and hierarchical family and gender values and
practices. The migrant family then becomes the site where obstacles to
integration originate: a threat to the Dutch social order. As Van Walsum
argued, this normative order is operationalized in state policies through
merged techniques of immigration control, integration policy and pedagogy. On the one hand, the normative order allows for selective policies of entry and residence, aimed at welcoming those who fit—such as
transnational elites of highly skilled labour migrants and their families—
and rejecting those who do not fit, such as asylum seekers and family
migrants from the Third World. On the other hand, the normative order
legitimates state intervention in the intimate sphere of transnational families living in the Netherlands.
Her entry point of family relations in studying migration law allowed
Sarah van Walsum to go beyond divisions between citizens and migrants.
Families often stretch across borders and are thus a good example of
shared interests between individuals that are otherwise classified by states
as citizens and migrants. Sarah also took families very seriously as social
units that form normative fields that can differ and stand in opposition
to dominant normative discourses transmitted through state institutions.


In Commemoration of Sarah Van Walsum, 1955–2014

xi

Sarah’s acute awareness of historical shifts allowed her to trace and connect developments in family norms, migration policy and family law. As
family ties have come to be defined in more inclusive manners by states,
for example, the family unit has received less protection in migration law.
As Sarah herself infamously put it, as homosexuality and non-marital sex
have lost their stigma, matrimony has lost its sanctity.
In an effort to balance the top-down approach in her analysis of family migration policies, she addressed the issue of modes of resistance by
migrants and migrant families from the 1970s to the present day, mentioning the equality principle from minority policy and international law
as important modes of resistance.
Her research also extended to domestic and care work, for which she
explored with great insight, the changing role that work performed in
households has played in the construction of citizenship and inclusion
and exclusion through migration law in the Netherlands and the EU
level, for example, resulting from free movement. She asked to what
extent such work was conceptualized as contractual labour or family
obligations, and the differences at national and EU levels to which such
reproductive labour qualified for residence and subsequent citizenship.
Her untimely death takes away from us a truly inspirational scholar
and practitioner.
School of Law
VU University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Department of Political Science
University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Department of Migration Law
University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands

Maybritt Jill Alpes

Saskia Bonjour

Betty de Hart


xii

In Commemoration of Sarah Van Walsum, 1955–2014

Department of Gender, Migration
and Citizenship, Social Policy Research Centre
Middlesex University
London, UK
Department of Law
Middlesex University
London, UK

Eleonore Kofman

Helena Wray


Acknowledgements

Many of the chapters in this book were presented and discussed at
the international conference ‘Family Life in the Age of Migration and
Mobility: Theory, Policy & Practice’ at Linköping University, Sweden,

in September 2013. We would like to acknowledge the financial support
of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Linköping University, Riksbankens
Jubileumusfonds and Fritz Thyssen Stiftung.
Professor Helma Lutz was co-organizer of the conference and offered
expert advice with her usual wisdom and generosity as we planned this
book—we extend a special and heartfelt thank you for her valuable
contribution to this project. Many thanks also go to Marija Grujic, who
managed the conference with grace and good humour. Special thanks
go to all the conference participants for their inspiring presentations
and intellectual engagement with the conference themes, and to all the
contributors to this volume who responded with collegiality to our many
requests. We wish to thank Philippa Grand, Emily Russell and, in particular, Judith Allan from Palgrave Macmillan for their kind support.
Gyuchan Kim deserves special thanks for completing the painstaking
task of formatting the manuscript and of preparing the index. Finally,
our wonderful colleague Sarah van Walsum died in the early stages of this
book’s preparation. Before her death, Sarah gave us permission to reprint

xiii


xiv

Acknowledgements

an article she had recently published. We are honoured to be able to
include a contribution from Sarah in this volume, and we wish to thank
Judith Allan at Palgrave Macmillan for negotiating the formal permission
on our behalf.

Contents

1

2

3

4

Introduction: Family Life in an Age of Migration
and Mobility: Introducing a Global and Family
Life-Course Perspective
Majella Kilkey and Ewa Palenga-Möllenbeck
Mobilities and Communication Technologies:
Transforming Care in Family Life
Loretta Baldassar
Everyday Practices of Living in Multiple Places
and Mobilities: Transnational, Transregional,
and Intra-Communal Multi-Local Families
Michaela Schier
Polymedia Communication Among
Transnational Families: What Are the Long-Term
Consequences for Migration?
Mirca Madianou

1

19

43

71

xv


xvi

5

Contents

Traveling to the USA for Fertility Services:
Push and Pull Factors
Lauren Jade Martin

6

Transnational Surrogacy and ‘Kinning’ Rituals in India
Amrita Pande

7

Marriage Migration Policy as a Social Reproduction
System: The South Korean Experience
Gyuchan Kim and Majella Kilkey

8

Strangers in Paradise? Italian Mothers in Norway
Lise Widding Isaksen

9

Transnational Mothers and the Law: Ghanaian
Women’s Pathways to Family Reunion
and Consequences for Family Life
Miranda Poeze and Valentina Mazzucato

95

119

137

163

187

10 Fatherhood and Masculinities in Post-socialist Europe:
The Challenges of Transnational Migration
Ewa Palenga-Möllenbeck and Helma Lutz

213

11 Swedish Retirement Migrants in Spain:
Mobility and Eldercare in an Aging Europe
Anna Gavanas and Ines Calzada

237

12 Contrasts in Ageing and Agency in Family
Migratory Contexts: A Comparison of Albanian
and Latvian Older Migrants
Russell King, Julie Vullnetari, Aija Lulle, and Eralba Cela

261


Contents

13 Defamilialization of Whom? Re-Thinking
Defamilialization in the Light of Global Care
Chains and the Transnational Circulation of Care
Florence Degavre and Laura Merla

xvii

287

14 The Contested Meaning of Care in Migration Law
Sarah van Walsum

313

15 Conclusions
Majella Kilkey and Ewa Palenga-Möllenbeck

337

Index

351



Notes on Contributors

Loretta  Baldassar is Discipline Chair of Anthropology and Sociology at the
University of Western Australia and Adjunct Principal Research Fellow at
Monash University and at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium. Loretta
has published extensively on transnational migration, caregiving and settlement
issues with a particular focus on families; ageing; the second generation; and
student mobility. Her most recent books include, Chinese Migration to Europe:
Prato, Italy and Beyond (with Johanson, McAuliffe & Bressan, Palgrave, 2015);
Transnational Families, Migration and the Circulation of Care: understanding
mobility and absence in family life (with Merla, Routledge, 2014); Conflicting
Identities: Refugee Protection and the Role of Law (with Kneebone & Stevens,
Routledge, 2014). Baldassar is a Board Member of the ISA Migration Research
Committee and a regional editor for the journal Global Networks. She is currently conducting research on migration and ageing, as well as student mobility
and Internationalization at Home.
Inés Calzada holds a PhD in Sociology (University of Salamanca, Spain) and
MSc in Methodology for the Social Sciences (London School of Economics).
She is a research fellow in the Institute of Public Goods and Policies of the
Spanish National Research Council. In her research, she combines the field of
comparative social policy and that of attitudes towards the Welfare State. She
has participated in several national and international research projects on different aspects of welfare policies, paying particular attention to the ways in which
individuals make sense of social inequalities and state intervention. In parallel,
xix

xx

Notes on Contributors

she maintains a sharp interest in the different methodologies that can be applied
in the social sciences.
Eralba  Cela is a postdoctoral researcher in Demography at the Polytechnic
University of Marche in Ancona, Italy, where she has held several research and
teaching positions since her PhD in Demography from the University of Bari.
Her research interests are in the fields of migration, remittances, family studies,
gender, ageing and well-being, and she has published in several Italian and international journals, including Rivista Italiana di Economia, Demografia e Statistica,
International Migration Review, Journal of Mediterranean Studies, and Population,
Space and Place.
Florence  Degavre is a socio-economist. She is an assistant professor at the
Faculté Ouverte de Politique Economique est Sociale and research coordinator
at the Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaires Travail, Etat et Société (CIRTES)
of the Université catholique de Louvain. Her main research theme is elderly care
which she analyses through a Polanyian and feminist perspective. In relation
with this, she has conducted research on European social policies, care regimes
and elderly care social services. She is also interested in the gender dynamic in
social economy organisations. Her current research is on social innovations in
the elderly home care sector in Belgium. She is a member of the EMES network
and Feminist economics. She has recently published book chapters on defamilialization in a comparative perspective (with Annamaria Simonazzi and Ludovica
Gambaro), migrant carers’ use of reciprocity (with Anna Safuta) and social innovation in the care sector (with Mélanie Bourguignon and Ela Callorda Fossati,
Sociologies pratiques).
Anna  Gavanas is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology and Gender
Studies at Remeso/Linköping University. She has a background in Social
Anthropology and Gender Studies. Gavanas is involved in research on Swedish

retirees in Spain as the principal investigator of the project ‘Swedish retirement
migrants to Spain and their migrant workers: interlinked migration chains and
their consequences for work and care in Ageing Europe’. Her research covers a
wide range of areas, including migration, welfare policies, labour market informalization and social exclusion. Additional areas of specialization are global care
chains in the EU, privatization of elderly care in Sweden, as well as US fatherhood politics.
Lise  Widding  Isaksen is a professor in the Department of Sociology,
University of Bergen, Norway. Her research interests include gender, migration, welfare states and globalization. She has written extensively on gender


Notes on Contributors

xxi

and power-relations, welfare politics and feminism, international migration
and the social organization of care work and gendered migrations in the
Global South and in Nordic and European contexts. Publications: Lise
Widding Isaksen (ed) (2010) Global Care Work. Gender and Migration in
Nordic Societies (Sweden); Lise Widding Isaksen (2012) ‘Transnational spaces
of care: migrant nurses in Norway’, Social Politics 19, 58–77. She is working
on transnational issues related to new migration flows in Europe, South–
North (Italy–Norway) and East–North (Poland–Norway).
Majella Kilkey is Reader in Social Policy, Department of Sociological Studies,
University of Sheffield, UK and Co-Director of the University’s Migration
Research Group. She researches at the intersection of migration and family
studies, focusing particularly on the intra-European Union mobility of European
Union citizens and the outward migration of UK nationals. Recent publications
include Gender, Migration and Domestic Work: Masculinities, Male Labour and
Fathering in the UK and USA (with Diane Perrons, Ania Plomien, Pierrette
Hondagneu-Sotelo and Hernan Ramirez, Palgrave 2013) and articles in Global
Networks, International Migration, Men and Masculinities, Social Policy and

Society, Time and Society, Feminist Economics, Community, Work and Families and
European Urban and Regional Studies. With Loretta Baldassar, Laura Merla and
Raelene Wilding she has contributed on ‘Transnational Families’ to the 2015
Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Families and the 2016 Handbook
of Migration and Health. Between 2016 and 2021 she is co-editor of the
Cambridge University Press journal Social Policy and Society.
Gyuchan Kim researches in the Department of Sociological Studies, University
of Sheffield, UK. His PhD thesis, which he completed in 2015, focused on the
intersections of the migration regime and the care regime in South Korea. His
research interests include the care–migration nexus especially with regard to
transnational aspects of family life, the evolution of East Asian welfare regimes
and policy learning between Korea and other welfare states.
Russell King is Professor of Geography at the University of Sussex, where he
founded and directed the Sussex Centre for Migration Research. During 2012–
2013 he was Willy Brandt Guest Professor in Migration Studies at Malmö
University. He has long-standing and wide-ranging research interests in the
interdisciplinary field of migration studies, including theorizing migration in
its various forms, and empirical studies on labour migration, international
retirement migration, student migration, return migration, diasporas and the
relationship between migration and development. Most of his field research has


xxii

Notes on Contributors

been carried out in Southern Europe and the Balkans. Amongst his recent
books have been Counter-Diaspora: The Greek Second Generation Returns ‘Home’
(joint with Anastasia Christou), Remittances, Gender and Development (joint
with Julie Vullnetari) and Out of Albania (joint with Nicola Mai). From 2000

to 2013 he was the editor of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.
Aija Lulle is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Geography at
the University of Sussex, and director of the Centre for Diaspora and Migration
Research at the University of Latvia. Trained both as a sociologist and human
geographer, her PhD thesis used time-geography to examine the translocal lives
of Latvian migrants in Guernsey. Her current interests relate to youth mobilities,
ageing and migration, and the lives of transnational families, as well as the
broader notion of identities. Her recent research also focuses on ‘new diasporas’
within the European Union as a result of intra-European migration. She has
published her research in several journals, including Geografiska Annaler, Women’s
Studies International Forum and Population, Space and Place.
Helma  Lutz is Professor in Sociology and Chair of Women’s and Gender
Studies at the Goethe University Frankfurt/Main. Her work combines insights
from Gender and Migration Studies concerning her research on transnational
migrant domestic work. She has published widely on issues of care, work, migration, transnationalism, intersectionality, ethnic and racial discrimination. Her
latest monograph in English is The New Maids. Transnational Women and the
Care Economy (2011).
Mirca Madianou is a Reader in the Department of Media and Communications
at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has published extensively on the
social consequences of new media, especially in relation to processes of transnationalism and migration. She is the author of Mediating the Nation: News,
Audiences and the Politics of Identity (2005) and Migration and New Media:
Transnational Families and Polymedia (2012 with D. Miller), as well as editor of
Ethics of Media (2013 with N.  Couldry and A.  Pinchevski). She directs the
ESRC programme ‘Humanitarian Technologies’ which investigates the uses of
social media in the context of disasters, while between 2007 and 2011, she was
Principal Investigator for the ESRC research programme ‘Migration, New
Communication Technologies and Transnational Families’.
Lauren  Jade  Martin is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies
Coordinator at Pennsylvania State University, Berks. Her work focuses on the
social impacts of assisted reproductive technologies. Martin has published

Notes on Contributors

xxiii

articles in Gender & Society, Science, Technology and Human Values, and
Globalizations journals, and recently published her first book, Reproductive
Tourism in the United States: Creating Family in the Mother Country.
Valentina  Mazzucato is Professor of Globalization and Development at
Maastricht University, The Netherlands, and Honorary Professor at the
Department of Social Work and Social Administration at Hong Kong University.
She heads several international research projects on transnational families (www.
tcra.nl) financed by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research
(NWO) and NORFACE. These projects use mixed methods ranging from largescale surveys to in-depth ethnographic research to study the effects of transnational families on parents abroad and caregivers and children in origin countries.
Some of her latest publications are in Journal of Marriage and Family (2011),
Population Space and Place (2010; 2004), Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
(2014; 2008), Global Networks (2009), World Development (2014; 2009), and
book chapters in Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-being Research (Springer,
2014), The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration (2013) and Multi-sited
ethnography: Theory, praxis and locality in contemporary social research (2009).
Laura  Merla is Professor of Sociology at the Catholic University of Louvain
(Belgium), where she is director of the Interdisciplinary Research Center on
Families and Sexualities (CIRFASE). She is also Honorary Research Fellow at
the University of Western Australia. Her main research areas are the sociology of
the family; migration, transnational families and care; ageing; social policies;
and gender and masculinities. Her research has been funded by the Belgian
National Funds for Research, the Belgian Federal Science Policy and two Marie
Curie fellowships. In 2014, Laura Merla published two edited volumes:
(1)  Transnational families, migration and the circulation of care: understanding

mobility and absence in family life (in collaboration with Loretta Baldassar); and
(2) Distances et Liens (in collaboration with Aurore François).
Ewa  Palenga-Möllenbeck is a postdoctoral researcher in the Gender Studies
Department at Goethe-University, Frankfurt. Her research interests include
migration, transnationalism, gender studies, care work, diversity, and qualitative
research methods. She is working on transnational migration of Polish handymen working in German households. She has published widely in books and
international journals on gender, care and migration. Her monograph
Pendelmigration aus Oberschlesien. Lebensgeschichten in einer transnationalen
Region Europas (Bielefeld: transcript, 2014) is based on her PhD thesis.


xxiv

Notes on Contributors

Amrita Pande, author of Wombs in Labor: Transnational Commercial Surrogacy
in India (2014), teaches in the Sociology department at University of Cape
Town. Her research focuses on the intersection of globalization and reproductive labor. Her work has appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society, Gender and Society, Critical Social Policy, International Migration Review,
Qualitative Sociology, Feminist Studies, Indian Journal of Gender Studies,
Anthropologica, PhiloSOPHIA and in numerous edited volumes. She has written
for national newspapers across the world and has appeared in Laurie Taylor’s
Thinking Allowed on the BBC, Sarah Carey’s Newstalk on Irish radio, DR2
Deadline (Danish National television) and Otherwise SAfM (south African
Radio) to discuss her work on surrogacy. She is also an educator-performer touring the world with a multi-media theatre production ‘Made in India: Notes
from a Baby Farm’.
Miranda Poeze is a PhD candidate at Maastricht University, The Netherlands.
Her PhD research focuses on Ghanaian transnational families and examines from
the viewpoints of migrant parents and stay-behind children and how local,
national and global processes interlink and impact on the everyday experiences of

family members. Her research is embedded in the international research project
‘Transnational Child Raising Arrangements’ (TCRAs) of which Valentina
Mazzucato is the primary investigator. She holds an MA in Social Research—
Cultural Anthropology of the VU University of Amsterdam. Her publications
include book chapters in Transnational Families, Migration and the Circulation of
Care: Understanding Mobility and Absence in Family Life (2013) and Long Journeys:
African Migrants on the Road (2013).
Michaela  Schier has been a senior researcher at the Munich-based German
Youth Institute (DJI) since 2006 and heads the DJI Division ‘Life Situations
and Family Life’ . She studied geography as well as social and cultural anthropology at the University of Tübingen and holds a PhD in social geography from the
Technical University of Munich, Germany. From 2009 to 2014, she was awarded
a fellowship by the Volkswagen Foundation to run the DJI-based Research
Group ‘Multi-local Families’. Exploring work-related and post-separation issues
among this target group, the team conducted quantitative secondary data
analyses and two ethnographic studies. Her theoretical and empirical research
interests focus on the geography of family and work; migration, mobilities and
multi-locality; gender, space and time; everyday life practices; and qualitative
methodology.