To tie or not to tie: Skilled professionals, transnational mobility, family and friends

Short Abstract:

Increasing numbers of skilled professionals move transnationally. This panel widens the focus from work-related issues to the mobile professionals’ personal lives, including the making and un-making of familial ties and friendships. How can an anthropological approach enrich the field?

Long Abstract:

Increasing numbers of skilled professionals move transnationally for career reasons. Often, they do not settle down in the destination permanently but move on after a few months or years. While many countries welcome these “career expatriates”, national immigration policies and multinational employers tend to focus on the individual worker, detached from family relations and personal friendships. Moreover, much of the literature on mobile international professionals is published in the field of management studies and many studies use quantitative methodology. Migration studies tend to ignore these “privileged migrants” too. In this panel, we want to widen the focus from work-related issues to the mobile professionals’ personal lives, including the making and un-making of familial ties and friendships. How is work-related mobility reconciled with the human practices of maintaining kin, or friendship ties? How can an anthropological approach enrich the field? Which anthropological concepts or theories are useful when investigating the familial and personal ties of mobile professionals? Which methodological approaches enable us to reach insights to the phenomenon (the “natives’ point of view) that is often invisible on policy level but highly visible online with the abundance of self-help pages and peer support communities? We are also interested in the instrumentalisation of mobility when it is made into a policy that purposefully manipulates with human tendency to associate in groups (e.g., the academic mobility which supposedly is one of the cornerstones of the European academic policy).

Mobility

For the Mobile Lives Forum, mobility is understood as the process of how individuals travel across distances in order to deploy through time and space the activities that make up their lifestyles. These travel practices are embedded in socio-technical systems, produced by transport and communication industries and techniques, and by normative discourses on these practices, with considerable social, environmental and spatial impacts.

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