Journal of Intergenerational Relationships | 2019
Call For Papers
Abstract
Guest editors R. Brandhorst, L. Baldassar and R. Wilding invite you to submit proposal abstracts for the Special Issue “Transnational family care ‘on hold’? Intergenerational relationships and obligations in the context of border regimes”, for the double-blind peer-reviewed “Journal of Intergenerational Relationships”. The journal particularly welcomes submissions that focus on intergenerational relationships, integrating practical, theoretical, empirical, familial, and policy perspectives. An increasing number of migrants are separated from their family by distance and national borders. Family expectations, relations, and solidarities play a central role in migration trajectories from the decision to migrate, through the processes of settlement in the host country, to the continuing connections to sending areas (Brandhorst 2015). Despite the geographic separation, members of transnational families continue to maintain a feeling of collective welfare and unity, of “familyhood” (Bryceson and Vuorela 2002), through transnational care and support practices that are mediated by family responsibility (Finch and Mason 1993) and engage in intergenerational “care circulation” (Baldassar and Merla, 2014). Migrant children provide aged care for their aging parents who remained in the country of origin (Baldassar, Baldock and Wilding 2007). Thus, intergenerational care obligations between grandchildren, children and parents are organized from afar. The current era of expanding transnational connections and growing mobility, however, is also characterized by an increasing entrapment and immobility of large parts of populations. The restrictive migration and family reunion policies, the “border regimes” and restrictive asylum policies, are characterized by “closure, entrapment and containment” (Shamir 2005: 199). “Mobility regimes” (Shamir 2005; Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013) and “border regimes” especially impact refugees who are constrained by refugee camps, sedentarist policies, resettlement, and insufficient economic means. The recent hold on family reunification policies for asylum seekers, and the restrictions in parent visa schemes inmany countries of the Global North pose a further obstacle for transnational family-aged care. This Special Issue seeks to explore how migrants and their aging parents exchange care in the context of reduced mobility, restrictive family reunion policies, restrictive parent visa possibilities and constrained agency across national