Javiera Cienfuegos Editor

Dr. Javiera Cienfuegos is Associate Professor at Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano (Chile) and obtained her PhD. in Sociology at Freie Universität Berlin. Her main research areas include family diversity, transnational migration, and social emotions, which converge on the phenomenon of transnational families, an issue which has worked intensively since 2007. Her dissertation was awarded the triannual prize Friedrich Katz of the Latin American Institute of the Free University of Berlin. This work has been published as a book by RIL Publishing House.

Between 2019 and 2021, Dr Cienfuegos was a visiting scholar at the Latin American Institute in the Freie Universitát Berlin, conducting post-doctoral research on family processes and labour trajectories of high-skilled migrants, including the countries of Germany and Chile. Her work is available in three different languages as book chapters and double-blind peer-reviewed articles. Recently, Dr Cienfuegos has been editor and co-editor of two books, Special Issues. 

Javiera Cienfuegos lectured sociology of migration and emotions, and qualitative and mixed methods of social research at Universidad Alberto Hurtado and Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano. Furthermore, Dr Cienfuegos promotes family diversity through an academic and community visual project called "Familia Glocal" the main objective is to render visible, rescuing quotidian experiences and issues the variety of forms of "doing family".

Rosa Brandhorst is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre on Migration, Citizenship and Development (COMCAD) at the Faculty of Sociology of the University of Bielefeld. From 2017 to 2019, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Discipline Group of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Western Australia. Brandhorst’s main research areas include sociology of family, migration and social transformation, with a particular focus on transnational families, the organization of transnational care, transnational ageing and transnational support networks. She has lectured on the sociology of migration, transnationalism and qualitative methods of social research at the University of Vienna, the University of Bielefeld,  the University of Göttingen and the University Porto Alegre. In the project "Ageing and New Media: A New Analysis of Older Australians' Support Networks” of the University of Western Australia Perth and La Trobe University Melbourne, Brandhorst analyzed the changes in the composition of older migrants' support networks. Furthermore, she conducted multi-sited research on transnational families between Cuba and Germany and their impact on social change in Cuba. Brandhorst has published a book on transnational families between Cuba and Germany and their impact on the social change in Cuba  and peer reviewed articles, book chapters and edited Special Issues on migration, transnational families and transnational ageing, as well as on qualitative methods of social research.  Her publications are available in English and German. 

Deborah Fahy Bryceson is a Professorial Fellow at the Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh and Extraordinary Professor at the Nordic Africa Institute, University of Uppsala. Trained as a geographer and a sociologist, she has been inter-disciplinary in approach throughout her career. She has worked at various research centres including the Bureau of Resource and Land Use Planning at the University of Dar es Salaam, where she did her undergraduate and Masters degrees, before doing her DPhil at the University of Oxford. She has held academic positions at the University of Dar es Salaam, the Architectural Association in London, the Afrika-Studiecentrum at the University of Leiden, Birmingham University and Glasgow University as well as research associateships with the Universities of Oxford, Copenhagen, Uppsala and Edinburgh. Her research consultancy work spans various United Nations agencies including the International Labour Office, FAO, UNCTAD, UNRISD, UNICEF and the United Nations University. In her work on African sectoral change she has pioneered the concepts of ‘de-agrarianization’ and ‘mineralized urban growth’. More generally she has gained widespread international recognition for her concept of the ‘transnational family’. She has been a member of a transnational family for the past 50 years and has written on the topic of transnational families for the past two decades. Her first book ,The Transnational Family co-edited with Ulla Vuorela (Berg Publishers, 2002), was the first to theorize the phenomenon of family transnationalism. More recently she edited Transnational Families in Global Migration: Navigating Economic Development and Family Life Cycles across Blurred and Brittle Borders, a Special Issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration (2019).