Theoretical Context
The concept of transnationalism (Basch et al. 1994; Glick Schiller et al. 1992; Glick Schiller and Fouron 1998; Glick Schiller 1999; Portes et al. 1999) has brought about new ways of understanding persons living outside their national states. Since its introduction in the literature, the concept has been refined and developed (Portes 2001; Levitt and Waters 2002; Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004; Levitt and Jaworsky 2007; Portes et al. 2007; Vertovec 2009), thus making it possible to conceive the notion of living in multiple worlds. The special merit of the new perspectives has been understanding mobility outside borders, not as departure, a one-directional movement toward the host country with integration there as a goal, but rather as a permanent relation to both the point of departure and that of destination, with an effect in both directions. Hence, we can speak of a strong influence of those who have departed on those who have stayed, the latter being involved in transnational existence, even while staying within national borders.
At the macro level, the sociopolitical interconnectedness of countries, geopolitical transnational relations and so on have allowed the development of transnational existence, which can be felt at the level of the individual, whether a leaver or a stayer. A defining role in the development of transnational existence, wherein a constantly increasing number of persons is involved, is played by the advancement of information and communications technology (ICT), which allows for permanent virtual interaction, as well as the development of transportation infrastructure and services, especially the emergence of the concept of low-cost air transport companies, enabling a growing number of people to be physically interconnected to an increasing degree at an expanding frequency and over greater distances.
Another defining moment of research has been the involvement of women as a subject within the study of migration (Petraza-Bailey 1991; Morokvasik 1984; Sassen 2000; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2000; Parreñas 2001; Pessar and Mahler 2003; Morokvasik 2004, 2007; Tolstokorova 2008), as well as the awareness that they are also an active element in the global population movement, not just as a passive constituency, but also in many cases as the main agents of migration, as opposed to simply being the companions of men. This phenomenon has developed alongside the concept of transnational motherhood (Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997), since these women on the move are also very often mothers of children who are left at home. The immediate next step was that of defining transnational families (Herrera Lima 2001; Bryceson and Vuorela 2002), that is, those families whose members, although living in different countries, manage to sustain family relations across borders. This was the moment when research on various aspects of transnational families started to proliferate. Although other approaches appeared as well in various countries, studies have been mostly centered on transnational motherhood (Parreñas 2001; Erel 2002; Ryan 2007; Fresnoza-Flot 2009; Madianou and Miller 2011; Ducu 2013), which implies children who are left behind (Parreñas 2005; Dreby 2007), and transnational parenting (Dreby 2006; Moran-Taylor 2008), as well as the relationship between adult children and elderly parents (Baldassar et al. 2007), and, to a lesser degree, the role of fathers within these transnational families (Pribilsky 2004; Tolstokorova 2016; Palenga-Möllenbeck and Lutz 2016) and children who migrate (Orellana et al. 2001; Mazzucato and Schans 2011).
As SĂžrensen and Vammen have underlined in a meta-analysis of studies on transnational families published in 2014, the general tendency of research was to think in terms of opposing binaries, such as women versus men, adults versus children, stayers versus leavers and staying connected or breaking relations, with a special emphasis on departed adults with an active role, while the elderly and children are viewed as stay-behind dependent persons. The recommendations of this study are to bring the elderly and children to the fore in research on these transnational families, analyzing their role within these families beyond being receivers of transnational support, as well as sometimes being the agents of movement themselves. Moreover, the current tendency is to look upon these families, not in terms of a binary opposition, but as families living in a permanent state of copresence.
We emphasize that most of the research on transnational families have been carried out through the prism of the concept of care (Raijman et al. 2003; Piperno 2007; Bernhard et al. 2009) and the care chain (Hochschild 2000; Basa et al. 2011) by focusing on the chain relations of the transfer of care within the binary logic when those who stay behind take over the responsibility of care from those who depart, with the latter taking over from the beneficiaries in the host country. This leads to the concept of the circulation of care (Baldassar and Merla 2013), which stipulates a corelation of care between leavers and stayers. The main actors of the families described through the dimension of care are women, which explains why using a gendered approach in migration studies is appropriate (Sherif Trask 2010; Fouron and Glick Schiller 2001; Kofman et al. 2011; Schmalzbauer 2011; Geisen and Parreñas 2013; Yeoh and Ramdas 2014; Schneebaum et al. 2015; Fresnoza-Flot and Shinozaki 2017; Ala-Mantila and Fleischmann 2017; Marchetti and Salih 2017), not only from the perspective of womenâs empowerment, but also from that of the relations between women and men within these types of family.
Family Practices and Transnational Families
When these families begin to be understood from the perspective of membersâ copresence, with the distances between them curtailed by permanent transnational relations, the best analytic approach when considering them involves the notion of doing family, as developed and refined by David Morgan (2011a, b). The copresence of these family members is permanently enabled in a virtual world through ICT (Nedelcu and Wyss 2016) and in the real world through mutual visits among family members (Morgan 2011a). The practices that these members employ for the purpose of doing family define what they are; they are not there as simple facts that appear within these families. Transnational families, as with many other types of family that find themselves questioned, such as lone-parent families or lesbian and gay families (Almack 2008), make a greater effort in terms of doing family (Kilkey and Palenga-Möllenbeck 2016), while, at the same time, having a heightened motivation toward displaying family (Finch 2007; Ducu 2014).
Overview of the Book
This book has members of (at least partly) Romanian transnational families as primary subjects, with a special interest in couples as a central...