Family Life in an Age of Migration and Mobility

"This excellent and fascinating collection throws new light on contemporary family practices in a global context. By connecting the fields of migration, mobilities, and the life course, its contributions enhance our understanding of the temporal and spatial paradoxes between social and biological reproduction, cultural practices, and geopolitical privileges and inequalities." (Fiona Williams, University of Leeds, UK) "This timely book makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of how contemporary family life is being re-shaped by migration and mobility. The commitment of the authors to empirical depth and theoretical innovation, combined with wide-ranging and topical case studies, make it essential reading for migration and family researchers." (Mary Gilmartin, Maynooth University, Ireland) "This highly topical collection elucidates the varied effects of mobility on families. Addressing a variety of issues that have so far been invisible or overlooked in scholarly and public discourse, it is essential reading for everyone wanting to better understand the implications of mobility for power relations and vice versa." (Krystyna Slany, Jagiellonian University Krakow, Poland) "This important new collection uses a migration and mobilities, globalization, and life-course perspective to fundamentally challenge how we understand family life in this age of heightened mobility. By including cases from across the world, elucidating impacts on parents as well as children, and looking carefully at the effect of policy, the authors rewrite the book on family life in revealing and valuable ways." (Peggy Levitt, Harvard University, USA)

In an age of migration and mobility many aspects of contemporary family life – from biological reproduction to marriage, from child-rearing to care of the elderly - take place against a backdrop of intensified movement across a range of spatial scales from the global to the local.In an age of migration and mobility many aspects of contemporary family life – from biological reproduction to marriage, from child-rearing to care of the elderly - take place against a backdrop of intensified movement across a range of spatial scales from the global to the local. This insightful book analyzes the opportunities and challenges this poses for families and for academic, empirical and policy understandings of ‘the family’ on a global level, including case studies from Europe, India, the Philippines, South Korea, the United States and Australia. With chapters on international reproductive tourism, transnational parenting, ‘mail-order brides’ and ‘sunset migration’, it examines the implications of migration and mobility for families at different stages of the life course. Moreover, it brings together leading international scholars to connect a fragmented field of research, and in so doing enables an interdisciplinary exchange, generating new insights for theory, policy and empirical analysis.