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The introduction chapter lays out the book’s main intervention, “multidirectional care” to examine how transnational family members from different places in the diaspora exchange care work in many different forms. Although the care work from transnational families are not similar in form (monetary remittances versus high school graduation) they generate labor nonetheless. The incommensurability of the currencies and capital of care work in transnational families is the inquiry of this work because these labors are often circulating on various political, financial and affective economies, yet some of them are valued less, or worse, invisible. By framing the laboring lives of Filipina migrants and their transnational families through the theory of social reproduction, the circulation of care work transnationally, reconceptualization of alternative care providers left behind and shifting gendered ideologies makes the unseen work of reproducing the family, particularly in a transnational arrangement, visible.

This chapter examines the impact of transnational family migration on the relationships between Lithuanian migrant adolescents living in Ireland and their non-migrant grandmothers residing in Lithuania. Drawing on cross-generational perspectives obtained through multi-sited, in-depth interviews, this chapter focuses on three major themes, namely: 1) the changing nature of grandmother-grandchild relationship as perceived by both parties involved; 2) practices endorsed in maintaining intergenerational ties transnationally; and 3) the key factors contributing to the grandmother-grandchild relationship in transnationally dispersed families. Findings discussed in this chapter contribute to the study of intergenerational relationships by providing a more nuanced understanding of how significant physical distance and long-time separation affect relationships, contact practices, and perceived emotional ties between grandparents and grandchildren.

Adjusting to long-standing political economic conditions and the culture of migration in the Philippines, Filipino kin view their role of caring for their families in the Philippines as a form of care for a migrant family member, even though the migrant is not the direct receiver of care. To this end, the stories in chapter one follows the transnational care work within family kin networks to establish just how they reconfigure and make meaning of social reproductive labor in and from different places in a transnational arrangement. The unit of analysis in this chapter is the Filipino transnational family; following care work and its different permutations from the migrant abroad and from families in the Philippines. Further, the roles that extended and fictive kin play in the transnational family emerge as key contribution in shifting gender ideologies in care work.

Analyzing emigration, immigration, and re-migration concurrently, under the framework of contemporaneous migration, directs us toward evaluating what it means to stake claims to different components of citizenship in more than one political community across a migrant’s life course. This chapter examines the way the Mainland Chinese migrants negotiate social reproduction concerns that extend across international borders, their multiple national affiliations, and aspirations for recognition and rights as they journey between China and Canada across the life course. Patterns of re-migration are transforming the social relations of citizenship, re-spatializing rights, obligations, and belonging. Source and destination countries are also reversed during repeated re-migration or transnational sojourning. Transnational sojourning forges citizenship constellations that interlink how migrants understand and experience citizenship across different migration sites.

Chapter four tells a story of emotional strain that travels on the circuits of multidirectional care just as the care work that is undergirded with love and warmth. The emotionality in care work specifically during trying times of anger, guilt and disappointment illustrates that a care work is still attended to even through the pains of their transnational relationship. It follows families moving in and out of growing pains, some faster than others. The chapter demonstrates that while care work travels multidirectionally, strain follows those circuits of care as well. And yet, families under emotional distress or disappointment can still participate in the labor of caring. The stories here actively pull apart the idealized notion that “care work” always comes from nurturance, love and warmth rather focusing on the work of sustaining the transnational family whether members feel gratified or good about that work.

Flexible citizenship is an increasingly popular transnational arrangement among middle to upper class Chinese families. The residential arrangements associated with this family strategy often involve some family members (usually the wives and children) going abroad and other members (usually the husbands) primarily living in the origin country. This article examines the production of masculinity in this context. Adopting participant observation and interviews, this study examines families participating in birth tourism in Los Angeles, United States, one of the most prominent forms of the Chinese family strategy of flexible citizenship. The findings illustrate the ways in which masculinities of Chinese men in this context are largely classed and constantly caught in tension. One the one hand, the husbands living in China express a constant need to reassure their dominant position over their wives and the male domestic helpers in the US. On the other hand, the Chinese male helpers in LA find themselves often having to renegotiate their own masculinity which is threatened by the male employers’ assertion of power and by the fact that domestic work involves care and emotional labour which is largely feminized.

This chapter sums up the meaning, forms, roles and definitions of care is at the crux of proposing multidirectional care as a model of transnational care. The different actors contributing care work in the transnational family urge us to decenter the lone migrant family member as the sole provider; rather it values the care work that many people involved in transnational family arrangements contribute to sustaining familial relationships while separated and shifting gender ideologies. It urges us to think about families with an expanded view, to include biological kin and fictive kin, both at home and abroad, as care workers. Although the multidirectional care model illuminates elaborate exchanges of care work, the conclusion critically examines the invisible, institutional actor--the Philippine labor brokerage state--reified in the discussions of reorganized care work in the Filipino transnational family. Finally, the chapter ends with a call to action for the support of migrant workers globally.

This chapter examines some dynamics of transnational families in the context of the Philippines, one of the largest source countries of migrant workers in contemporary globalization. It focuses on how young adult children of migrant mothers interpret their transnational life. It also identifies the challenges that geographic distance poses for transnational families, including marital strain, emotional distance, and the pain of family separation. Philippine society abides by the integrative model of the family and measures transnational mothering against this model. Holding on to the views of the integrative model on the family aggravates the difficulties experienced by children by encouraging them to view their mother's redefinition of mothering as not only an abandonment of traditional duties but also the abandonment of them as children. Following the diversity model would not only facilitate children's recognition of nontraditional forms of care provided by extended kin up close and mothers from afar, but would also ease the emotional difficulties imposed on them by the geographic distance in their family.

Chapter two examines care work and intimacy between transnational family members shaped by the advancement in communication technologies, specifically, Skype and Facebook. New care providers, patterns of care work and forms of care emerge through these particular technological platforms. Although, technology brings new possibilities of supporting relationships over long distances, it also sometimes hinders relationships through its “all seeing eye” character. Transnational family members are impressive in their ability to stay connected through technology and yet, these strategies are only possible in fact because they are necessary in a world where families are forced to be separated to sustain their livelihoods. The chapter examines multidirectional care through technology’s role in transforming the relationships in transnational families and, importantly, assessing that possibilities and challenges of this development of care under the neoliberal condition they are transformed.

This chapter discusses the intersecting significance of gender, national origin, citizenship status, and age in forming the back-and-forth migration of transnational family members. The focus of its discussion is children, with the aim of bringing their relationships, presence, and participation with adults more fully into immigration research. The chapter also includes the story of Elian Gonzalez, a 5-year-old Cuban boy who was the focus of a child-custody battle among members of a transnational family. Elian's story highlights the experiences of families whose members maintain relationships, as well as those involving the raising of children, across national borders.

Research on transnational families mostly assumes long physical distances and long periods of separation. However, transnational families are diverse and reconfigure in a multitude of ways. The US–Mexican border in Arizona is historically a fluid one, where contact between families is a potential. This possibility of physical contact on a semi-regular basis makes the current sample unique from other transnational families. Using exploratory and descriptive analysis, this chapter provides a portrait of family life for migrant families along the Arizona–Sonora border with the goal of illustrating the diversity of family life for transnational families. Study findings suggest multiple family configurations, including transborder families (with members living within 60 miles of the border on either side) who have frequent physical contact and transnational families with long physical separations and little physical contact. Various aspects of family life (e.g., parenting) between transborder and transnational families are also compared.

This chapter examines the effects of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on storytelling as a practice of communication among transnational families. It describes three technological affordances that are linked to digital storytelling practices of six Colombian migrant families residing in Montreal, Canada: presence, interactivity, and multimodality. After providing an overview of the methodological approach employed in the research study and the techniques used to collect and analyse the data, the chapter discusses the findings with regard to the views of the participant families about the dynamics of their post-migration storytelling experiences. More specifically, it considers the Colombian families' perspectives about being present during their digital interactions. An important finding is that digital mediation seems to be altering family storytelling. For some families, ICTs catalyse storytelling in situations where presence and multimodality take place; for others, ICTs constrain family storytelling when the illusion of nonmediation is not experienced.

This chapter analyzes transnational adoptions of children by their relatives in Québec, where they represent a significant fraction of all international adoptions. Transnational family adoptions remain invisible in most European and American countries, even though approximately half of domestic adoptions and a significant proportion of fosterage relationships are also intrafamilial. Even more than the continuity of the child's origins and the addition of kin through multiple parenthood, the adoption of a related child is inscribed in a logic of family blending in which all of the elementary relations of kinship—filiation, genetics, and alliance—are drawn in and reshuffled. And although some sending countries prefer this type of adoption, which parallels and often accompanies international migration, national laws and international conventions are ill-equipped to deal with transnational family adoptions.

This chapter focuses on categorization by the U.S. state, emphasizing how U.S. immigration policies and practices create a form of contingent citizenship—a concept that, while applicable to all transnational Mexicans, is particularly evident among the youngest of migrants, those with or without documents. The experiences of young people underscore spatial and symbolic shifts in understandings of national belonging and exclusion among individuals within undocumented immigrant families or families of mixed U.S. legal status. Indeed, through the construction of “aliens” and “citizens,” the state creates shifting or contingent citizenship for children within transnational mixed-status families. Moreover, the physical movement and geographic and symbolic locations of children reveal the instability of citizenship itself.

This chapter examines how traditional Chinese family remittances became a battleground between Nationalist China and Communist China and how transnational families were made to serve the foreign policy goals of the Cold War. Established overseas Chinese communities had a long tradition of sending remittances home to families left behind in China. During World War II, their remittances, investments, and donations propped up the Chinese economy, funded the war effort, and provided relief to struggling citizens. This chapter considers the attempts of the two Chinese governments and the United States to use Chinese Americans in public diplomacy. It also explores how the United States and Nationalist China tried to exploit the rift caused by land reform and the extortion rumors in Communist China to gain support for the Nationalist regime.

This chapter examines the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) by Mexican immigrant families living in the United States to care for their aged left-behind parents and grandparents suffering from poor health. It introduces the concepts of ‘rescue chain’ and ‘care talk’ to account for the interplay between ICTs and transnational families. Drawing on the stories of ten participants, the chapter considers how Mexican immigrants and their siblings, locally and abroad, form rescue chains to deliver care to ageing left-behind parents with health problems through ICTs. It shows that the rescue chain communication involves care talk that focused on protecting, providing, and proving that the care needs of the person in crisis were addressed. The chapter also reviews the literature on ageing and long-distance caring through ICTs, discusses theories on care and ageing, and explains the methodology and sources used in the study.

This chapter explores the use of technologies as objects and tools in family research. It first considers four main sociological objects that are involved in the interplay between family life and information and communication technologies (ICTs): intimate couple life, intergenerational relationships, transnational or migrant families, and the life course. It then discusses the positive and negative social effects of ICT usage in family life before describing a project based on the life course approach, with a family-centred methodology as the privileged unit of analysis, that utilised CAQDAS (computer assisted qualitative data analysis software) to investigate the processes of social mobility in Portugal over recent decades. The chapter shows that technologies can be envisaged both as an object of study (technology usage and its impact on family relationships in a life course perspective) and as an instrument (technology as a tool).

This chapter analyzes how kin-related values, norms, and practices become entangled in the hegemony of global supply chains. A demographic paradox exists in significant births registered to foreign women and subsequent sending of babies to China. This circulation of children gives rise to new discourses and interventions on parenting, from institutions and experts, as children move in and out of Italian healthcare systems and schools. Encounter ethnography juxtaposes vocabularies of Chinese parents with the know-how of professional Italian health workers and educators. The chapter highlights the creation of global households as part of a broad variety of noncapitalist activities that co-exist with and even underwrite capitalism. Within the fast-fashion niche, sending babies to China to be raised by grandparents or other relatives has become a coping strategy. Salient themes include tempos of work, alienation, intimacy, and inevitability. Parent protagonists reveal the value gained or heartache endured from the transnational movement of children. Parents find value in circulating children in its power to activate systems of reciprocity across kin, to create networked bodies across territories, to secure affective bonds and strengthen mutual relations across generations, and to free up time so as to enhance their ability to work and make money.