This book explores the many varied ways in which family and intimate lives are realized through mobility: from leaving home, courtship, relationship breakdown, moving house, commuting, family holidays through to children's mobilities, documenting how mobility creates, sustains and dissolves family and intimate relations.

This book explores the many varied ways in which family and intimate lives are realized through mobility: from leaving home, courtship, relationship breakdown, moving house, commuting, family holidays through to children's mobilities, documenting how mobility creates, sustains and dissolves family and intimate relations.

As globalization and transnational encounters intensify, people’s mobility is increasingly conditioned by intimacy, ranging from love, desire, and sexual liaisons to broader family, kinship, and conjugal matters. This book explores the entanglement of mobility and intimacy in various configurations throughout the world. It argues that rather than being distinct and unrelated phenomena, intimacy-related mobilities constitute variations of cross-border movements shaped by and deeply entwined with issues of gender, kinship, race, and sexuality, as well as local and global powers and border restrictions in a disparate world.

As globalization and transnational encounters intensify, people’s mobility is increasingly conditioned by intimacy, ranging from love, desire, and sexual liaisons to broader family, kinship, and conjugal matters. This book explores the entanglement of mobility and intimacy in various configurations throughout the world. It argues that rather than being distinct and unrelated phenomena, intimacy-related mobilities constitute variations of cross-border movements shaped by and deeply entwined with issues of gender, kinship, race, and sexuality, as well as local and global powers and border restrictions in a disparate world.

This collection explores mobile childhoods: from Latvia and Estonia to Finland; from Latvia to the United Kingdom; from Russia to Finland; and cyclical mobility by the Roma between Romania and Finland. The chapters examine how east-to-north European family mobility brings out different kinds of multilocal childhoods. The children experience unequal starting points and further twists throughout their childhood and within their family lives. Through the innovative use of ethnographic and participatory methods, the contributors demonstrate how diverse migrant children’s everyday lives are, and how children themselves as well as their translocal families actively pursue better lives. The topics include naming and food practices, travel, schooling, summer holidays, economic and other inequalities, and the importance of age in understanding children’s lives. Translocal Childhoods and Family Mobility in East and North Europe will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology and human geography.

Family mobility decisions reveal much about how the public and private realms of social life interact and change. This sociological study explores how contemporary families reconcile individual members’ career and education projects within the family unit over time and space, and unpacks the intersubjective constraints on workforce mobility. This Australian mixed methods study sampled Defence Force families and middle class professional families to illustrate how families’ educational projects are necessarily and deeply implicated in issues of workforce mobility and immobility, in complex ways. Defence families move frequently, often absorbing the stresses of moving through ‘viscous’ institutions as private troubles. In contrast, the selective mobility of middle class professional families and their ‘no go zones’ contribute to the public issue of poorly serviced rural communities. Families with different social, material and vocational resources at their disposal are shown to reflexively weigh the benefits and risks associated with moving differently. The book also explore how priorities shift as children move through educational phases. The families’ narratives offer empirical windows on larger social processes, such as the mobility imperative, the gender imbalance in the family’s intersubjective bargains, labour market credentialism, the social construction of place, and the family’s role in the reproduction of class structure.

The emotional, social, and economic challenges faced by migrants and their families are interconnected through complex decisions related to mobility. Tangled Mobilities examines the different crisscrossing and intersecting mobilities in the lives of Asian migrants, their family members across Asia and Europe, and the social spaces connecting these regions. In exploring how the migratory process unfolds in different stages of migrants’ lives, the chapters in this collected volume broaden perspectives on mobility, offering insight into the way places, affects, and personhood are shaped by and connected to it.