Suchergebnisse

This book explores the impact of transnational migration on the views, feelings, and practices of home among migrants. Home is usually perceived as what placidly lies in the background of everyday life, yet migrants' experience tells a different story: what happens to the notion of home, once migrants move far away from their "natural" bases and search for new ones, often under marginalized living conditions? The author analyzes in how far migrants' sense of home relies on a dwelling place, intimate relationships, memories of the past, and aspirations for the future-and what difference these factors make in practice. Analyzing their claims, conflicts, and dilemmas, this book showcases how in the migrants' case, the sense of home turns from an apparently intimate and domestic concern into a major public question. Paolo Boccagni is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Trento, Italy. His main research areas are transnational migration, social welfare, care, diversity and home, and his publication record includes articles in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Global Networks, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and Housing, Theory and Society. He is also Principal Investigator of the European Research Council project HOMInG - The home-migration nexus: Home as a window on migrant belonging, integration and circulation (ERC STG 678456, 2016-2021).--

This article makes a case for investigating the needs of migrant women as transnational mothers, and the sources of social support accessible to them. Much has been written on migrants' homebound commitments and obligations in terms of transnational caregiving, care chains, and the like. Less analysed are the consequences on their personal needs and demands, which are out of synch with the territorially-based social welfare provision of either sending or receiving countries. Building on my fieldwork with Ecuadorian care workers in Italy, I explore migrant women's constructions of their care needs and the limited social support they rely upon in host and home societies, as well as in the 'intermediate space' of their cross-border care practices. Overall, the prospects for their indirect needs for care to emerge as a public issue are contentious and uncertain. By delving into them, though, critical light is shed on the ambivalences and tensions inherent in migrants' practice of care, at many levels: concerning its gendered bases, its elusive boundaries and the overload of affections and expectations which it typically bears.

AbstractCollective remittances, in the framework of migrant transnationalism, have been recently dealt with in some empirical research, especially on the Mexican‐US migration system. Far less studied is their significance in different migration flows, including their real contribution – as desirable as this may be – to local development. The article is concerned with a bottom up analysis of a migration flow where collective remittances – as the only way for emigrants to keep helping their local communities, well beyond their own families – are still in their infancy. It explores, through a translocal ethnography of Ecuadorian migration to Italy, the underlying attitudes, personal meanings and expectations – as well as the structural opportunities and constraints – accounting for helping practices at a distance. Charitable transfers to communities of origin are reconstructed as to their motivations, their main aims and beneficiaries, their embeddedness in mutual networks among immigrant co‐nationals. How is it that some of them decide to help "people in need" in their own communities overseas, or in their home towns, or in both? Is this an expression of communal belonging, or a matter of social status maintenance, or something else?Further reflections on the dilemmas inherent in transnational helping practices are then developed. Concluding remarks emphasize the relatively poor scope for such initiatives, in a recent and first‐generation flow over a long distance. While co‐ethnic solidarity overseas is a precondition for transnational helping practices, the latter are also affected by the developments of public policies in the countries of origin and of destination. Overall, an effective integration overseas is necessary for collective remittances to have some currency and impact.

The article revisits my personal relationships with fieldwork members in an ethnography on transnational migration between Ecuador and Italy. As this focused on the social relationships and practices that may connect emigrants with their motherland, the import of my interpersonal relationships was a crucial one. In reflecting on their development and impingements, I draw on three interpretive categories: respect, in terms of reciprocal recognition and legitimation with the members of the social group I had selected for my fieldwork; opportunities, i.e. the influence of structural factors, along with contingencies, on my ethnographic involvement; and interests, that is the motivations and objectives underlying my participant observation, along with the expectations emerging in those I met and stayed with. The implications and dilemmas of my field relationships are also sketched out, with respect both to the knowledge generated through my fieldwork, and to my own positioning within it. I finally reflect on the scope for collaboration, and for fair and 'balanced' relationships with the interlocutors of my research.