Transnational Affect and Emotion in Migration Research

Abstract

Transnational migrants characteristically participate in an array of activities—mediated by flows of material objects and symbolic ties—to reproduce their transnational social fields. Scholars of transnationalism have generally understood it to be motivated by questions of identity, belonging, social memory, and sociality. However, in our own research, we have found the affective and emotional dimensions of transnational practice and believe that this represents a productive new theoretical and methodological approach that can advance our collective understanding of what motivates, compels, and structures transnational actors’ participation in transnational social fields, and reproduce emotional communities across borders and more broadly in the area of migration research. In this paper, we develop the notion of transnational affect and emotion to describe this emergent field of research. We argue that an array of affects such as shame, honour, pride, guilt, and obligation structure inter-subjective relationships and modes of reciprocity within transnational social fields.

Keywords:

• Transnational affect
• transnational communities
• transnational emotions
• transnationalism

Notes

We first coined the term “transnational affect” in a working paper (Wise and Velayutham 2006). Subsequently, we developed a working definition for the term in a journal article (Wise and Velayutham 2008). We would like to thank colleagues and anonymous readers who reviewed different versions of the full paper.

Affective intensities is a concept borrowed from Hage Ghassan (2002).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amanda Wise

Amanda Wise is an associate professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology at Macquarie University, New South Wales, Australia. Her research interests include global cities; multiculturalism and “everyday multiculturalism;” race and interethnic relations; diasporic, transnational, and migrant communities; and labor mobility in and from Asia. She has published numerous articles on these topics and is author of Exile and Return among the East Timorese (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006) and coeditor (with Selvaraj Velayutham) of Everyday Multiculturalism (Palgrave, 2009).

Selvaraj Velayutham

Selvaraj Velayutham is a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Macquarie University, New South Wales, Australia. His research interests are in the areas of international migration, race and ethnic studies, everyday multiculturalism, and the sociology of everyday life.