Transnational care in the immobility regime: families facing closed borders and restrictive migration policies

Louvain-La-Neuve

Call for papers : Transnational care in the immobility regime: families facing closed borders and restrictive migration policies - Joint Session: RC 31 Migration (host) & RC 06 Family Research

Organised by: Loretta Baldassar (UWA); Majella Kilkey (Sheffield) and Laura Merla (UCLouvain)

In our current time, people on the move are confronted with the 'immobility regime' (Turner, 2007). Motivated variously by a desire to assert their nation-state sovereignty, to protect their labor markets and welfare states, to exclude the 'terrorist' or racialized 'other', and to get (re-)elected, governments are responding to mobile populations with the policies and rhetoric of ‘closure, entrapment and containment’ (Shamir, 2005: 199). Popular accounts have focused on high profile examples, such as the suspension of Schengen during the 'Mediterranean refugee crisis', Trump's raising of the wall between Mexico and USA and Brexit. Alongside these is a more generalized drift towards restrictive migration policies, which privilege some types of mobility over others. Where do care and family relations fit in such processes is a question of fundamental importance.

Family relations and solidarities have been recognized as playing a central role in all stages of people’s migration journeys, from the specification of migratory plans to processes of long-term settlement and, eventually, return. Research has shown that members of transnational families are connected across space and time through their engagement in processes and practices of ‘care circulation’ (Baldassar and Merla, 2014), subject to the political, economic, cultural and social contexts of their place(s) of residence. These exchanges can simultaneously function as informal sources of social protection, and place a heavy burden on the shoulders of migrants and their relatives, particularly when faced with restrictive migration policies that limit their capacity to access and mobilize the resources that allow them to meet their (transnational) family duties, including mobility.

In this session, we welcome papers that:

- Examine the circulation of care within refugee journeys (including how care responsibilities are implicated in decisions to start, stop, stay, move on, settle and / or return);
- Interrogate the treatment of care within immobility regimes (including regimes undergoing significant change, such as the UK in the context of 'Brexit', the USA under Trump, as well as those characterized by a more generalized restrictionist drift)
- Examine the implications for how transnational families (re)configure care arrangements in the context of immobility regimes;
- Contribute to a political agenda that addresses the marginalization of care within migration regimes, for example by re-evaluating the economic costs and contributions of caring by taking into account transnational flows of care

Submission deadline : 30 September 2017. Abstracts of max 300 words should be submitted online through this link : http://www.isa-sociology.org/en/conferences/world-congress/toronto-2018/call-for-abstracts/

Accepted participants for oral presentation and distributed papers will be notified in early December. Full papers will be due by 30 March 2018, and will be considered for publication in a journal special issue. Please note that only original contributions will be considered for publication.

To facilitate discussion and exchanges during the session, full papers will be circulated in advance to session participants and each paper will be assigned a discussant.

Publié le 24 avril 2017