1. Family Life Course Transitions, Social Reproduction across the Generations, and Migration: Conceptual Approaches Catherine Locke, (School of International Development, UEA)

2. Aim ► This presentation based on a joint working paper with Janet Seeley and Nitya Rao with the wider aim of: making sense of what we know about the distinctive implications of mobile livelihoods for social protection with particular reference to social reproduction and inter-generational relations ► Focus here is on family life course transitions and their potential to contribute to understandings of these linkages ► Presentation will try to synthesise existing thinking about family life course, social reproduction and migration. ► To distil key questions to be addressed

3. Migration and the Family: ‘Building a life’ (Whitehead 2002:577)  Migration motivated by: ► trying to make up for perceived shortfalls in social provisioning for families ► trying to move out of chronic poverty ► trying to build a better life for the future (next generation)  Social protection is a ‘driver’ of migration and migration itself generates new social protection needs.  But migration inevitably involves takes on new risks and vulnerabilities in sustaining family relations.  Migration is both fundamentally about and in tension with family roles and responsibilities.

4. (Social) Reproduction:  We deliberately disrupt usual division between social reproduction and reproduction  Concerned with the way that the reproduction of society (institutions, culture, polity, economy) is closely entwined with the reproduction of the household (biological, daily and generations reproduction)  Reproduction involves care but is much broader than care (and may be commoditised or unpaid)  Migration an interesting lens because translocational householding presents new challengse and opportunities for the articulation of social reproduction, reproduction and production for both households, as well as sending and receiving destinations/nations.

5. Neglected linkages that revolve around: ► The ‘everyday’ and generational social reproduction of migrant and migrant’s family ► Shifting configurations of trade offs and tensions between social reproduction and migration over family life course ► The shifting patterns of need for social protection that are generated by migration and which are closely linked to family life course

6. The value of family life course: ► To bring together work on specific sets of intergenerational relations in order to develop thinking around migration, social reproduction and social protection ► Growing bodies of work on these linkages between migration, social reproduction and social protection are clustered around three key family life transitions: ► To marriage and building a new family ► From childhood through youth to early adulthood ► To becoming old, disabled or sick and needing care

7. Life course analysis Elder’s life course paradigm  Impact of events on individual lives depends on their timing and sequencing  Individual lives are inter-dependent with the lives of others (so-called ‘linked lives’)  Individual life courses are embedded within changing historical times (and places)  Individuals make their life courses both through their choices but also through their subjective interpretations (agency and meaning-making)

8. Qualitative life course approaches  Inter-disciplinary  Capable of a strong articulation of structural analyses with questions of agency and identity  emphasises self-defined transitions, trajectories and turning points;  can engage well with and across different cultural and institutional settings,  can explore changing experiences, strategies and aspirations ‘in trying to build a life’

9. How does life course specifically relate to the understanding social reproduction in the context of migration? ► Narrative life histories have long been used for rich studies of emigration/immigration, social mobility, and for exploring lived experiences of rapid social changes. ► Life course fits well with the relational motivations and goals of migrants and the ‘linked lives’ of their families ► Life course thinking can engage closely with the social and temporal dimensions that are core to social reproduction and problematic for migrants  ‘the impossibility of being’ part of a family as a localised unit (Carrasco 2010:189);  ‘ongoingness over time’ (Ansell 2008:803); temporality and precaracity.

10. Balancing acts The (re) negotiation of (social) reproduction of migrants/their families: ► heavily inflected by gendered power relations and social identities ► sharpened by increased feminisation of migration ► under pressure from wider changes in social provisioning ► obstructed by exclusion of secondary or non-citizens from welfare systems ► Pressured by globalised economic crisis, ‘vagabond capitalism’ and ‘export of labour’

11. Some insights ► The struggle to sustain gendered family roles and identities. Nurturing of conventional gender identities in the face of different reality shores up the family. Recasting of going away to work as doing parenting obscures gendered conflicts. Highly gendered costs but fathering and masculinities under- explored. ► Ambiguities, tensions and trade-offs in translocal parenting. Nutrition, school fees and medicines may be assured but an absence of parenting and the intimacies of family life. Can undermine socialisation, the development of secure identities, and jeopardise the development of appropriate family relationships. ► Complex/ambivalent relationships of elders with co-resident and migrant children/grandchildren. The relative importance of knowing that you lived your life well, that subsequent generations are doing well and that you have meaningful relationships with them (even if over long distances). Subtleties around the meanings of pension incomes, material and social remittances.

12. Key questions ► What are the varying (social) reproductive needs of migrants and their families and how do these change across family life course in specific settings? ► How far is migration, and the specific choices that are made, orientated to meeting (social) reproductive needs of migrants and their families at significant transitions in family life course? ► How do migrants and their families try to sustain marital, parenting, caring and family roles across distance or in host societies? (and how does trans-locational house- holding change aspirations for and the meanings of family life course?) ► How are the above shaped by, and in turn shape, the trans-local social organisation of social security? (What do different immigration-citizenship regimes imply for social reproduction of family life course?)

13. Looking at migration through family life course is valuable in: ► Building the case for revaluing social reproduction in broader thinking about desirable development/ change: ► More attention to men and masculinities in relation to social reproduction and family life. ► More attention to the way challenges posed by internal migration especially across distance is problematic for social reproduction in similar ways to international migration. ► Raising critical issues about the inter-relation between social protection, social policy and citizenship issues. ► Connecting up micro-level analysis and concerns with macro-level structural and policy concerns in ways that reflect whole relational lives.

14. Structure 1. Revisit social reproduction: 2. Review social protection debates: 3. Argue for the value of family life course: => Identify core questions for taking this forward

15. 2. Review social protection debates:  Establish a broad definition of social protection  Situate social protection firmly within social policy and citizenship debates  Look at how migration and (social) reproduction are approached within social protection thinking