Families, transnationalism and mobilities

Our areas of research include the experience and governance of transnational adoption, the intersection of work and family life in migrant and transnational families, the organization of care in co-resident and transnational families, the articulation of migrant women’s mothering practices as citizenship practices, the reconstitution of familial roles in migration, the gendered agency of migrants in making and re-making families, migrant families and social and cultural capital.

People involved in work in this theme include: Monica Dowling, Umut Erel, Parvati Raghuram, Nicola Yeates.

Alongside and including individual research interests, there are currently 2 projects in this theme:

European Migrant Mothers in London: Citizenship, Belonging and Mobility

Investigator: Umut Erel (Research Fellow, OU Faculty of Social Sciences)

This project aims at refining our theoretical and empirical understanding of migrant mothers’ citizenship practices. Research about migrant mothers has often focused on integration but neglected questions of citizenship. The project is thus based on empirical research conducting in 2011, consisting of 30 in-depth focused interviews with migrant mothers from European countries in London. The interviews look at the migration process, motivation for migration, experience of becoming a mother and of bringing up children in migration. The project explores how the migrant mothers think about cultural identity and belonging for themselves and for their children. It asks how the mothers think about their children’s future in terms of transnational belonging, multiculturalism and European citizenship. The project is currently in the data analysis phase.

The development of domestic adoption and fostering in China and the implications for Intercountry Adoption

This project is an ESRC collaborative bid with Remnin University China and a PhD student, Katia Narzia, started in January 2012 to the experiences of internationally adopted children in Italy. She is supervised by Monica Dowling (Professor, OU Faculty of Health and Social Care).