Mobility Regimes, Temporalities and Transnational Families
Franchesca MORAIS, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Brenda YEOH, National University of Singapore, Singapore
The ever-shifting regulatory practices that govern the movement of people across borders calls for a new understanding of mobility in the context of increasing securitization. While borders are becoming more closed off for some groups of migrants, others are conditionally allowed entry into a nation’s territory. This had led scholars to think in terms of ‘mobility regimes’ to encapsulate the complex modes of differentiation within governing structures of mobility (Glick-Schiller and Salazar, 2013). Since then, a rich body of scholarship emerged giving weight to how people move through and interact with mobility regimes. Yet, less work has focussed on how these regulatory and surveillance systems might affect social relations. Importantly, increasingly stringent mobility regimes not only negatively impact migrants or prospective migrants, but also their transnational family members living across nation-state boundaries (Merla et al., 2020). In addition to foregrounding the family scale, this presentation aims to highlight the importance of time and temporality for understanding the interconnections between transnational families and mobility regimes. We explore the mutually constitutive effects of family formations and practices on the one hand and prevailing mobility regimes on the other and show how these are predicated on various temporal constraints. In particular, we highlight three different lines of transnational family research where a combined conceptual focus on mobility regimes and temporality yields important insights: life course stages, remittances and transnational family strategies. We conclude with a discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic, where transnational families encounter various mobility regimes with the closure of national borders, travel restrictions and lockdowns. The unpredictability of borders during the pandemic raises important questions about how transnational families might regroup and strategize in times of crisis and uncertainty.
Mots clés : transnational families|migration|temporality|mobility regimes|borders
A104737FM