The recalcitrance of distance: exploring the infrastructures of sending in migrants’ lives

Abstract

This paper puts the spatiality of migration, and more specifically post-migration connections, centre stage. It explores the distances confronted by migrants as they stay connected with their pre-migration lives, recognising that these distances are recalcitrant, asymmetrically governed spaces. Indeed, migrants can be understood as experts in the navigation of international space and ‘the tyranny of distance’. Inspired by recent work on urban and translocal infrastructures and taking the empirical example of migration infrastructures in the lives of Poles and Zimbabweans in the UK, looking particularly at the materiality and logistics of sending things back, this paper builds new discussions about migration which take the spatial, physical and grounded elements of migration and translocalism more seriously.

Keywords:

• Sending
• infrastructure
• courier services
• Polish
• Zimbabwean
• migration
• transnationalism

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Kathrin Hörschelmann and Kimberley Peters for their comments on this article.