Events

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Brenda Yeoh, Asia Research Institute, and Department of Geography, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

This is a paper which reports on work in progress from the YMAP project and is co-authored by Anita Harris, Shanthi Robertson and Loretta Baldassar. Transnational mobility is increasingly presented to middle-class youth globally as a way to secure economic futures in precarious times by enhancing educational and employment opportunities. However, little is said about the benefits and impacts of mobility for social and intimate life, and specifically how it is situated within, disruptive of, or incorporated into young people’s ideas about relationships as they navigate uncertain pathways to adulthood. Further, family and friendship are traditionally treated separately and understood in predominantly normative ways in both migration and youth scholarship, despite becoming increasingly entangled and multifaceted in the complex trajectories of youth mobility and the changing nature of transitions to adulthood. In this seminar, I consider how contemporary youth mobility disrupts standard life-course and migration studies conventions about intimate relationships, focusing particularly on questions of temporality, proximity and synchronicity, or orthodoxies of ‘the right time’ and ‘the right place’ to ‘settle down’, in the construction and maintenance of both intimate connections to people and attachments to places. I also explore how youth mobility complicates notions of the appropriate staging and chronology for establishing different relationships. In so doing, questions about synchronicity, continuity and proximity as conditions of intimacy are raised; how mobility potentially disrupts gendered and heteronormative life courses to provide both welcome freedoms and new challenges; and how new processes of transnational intergenerational care circulation emerge.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Loretta Baldassar is Professor in the Discipline Group of Anthropology and Sociology at The University of Western Australia. She has published extensively on migration, with a particular focus on transnational families and caregiving. Prof Baldassar is Vice President of the International Sociological Association Migration Research Committee and a regional editor for the journal Global Networks. She is co-Chief Investigator on ARC Discover Projects: Ageing and New Media (Wilding, La Trobe) and Youth Mobilities (Harris, Deakin, and Robertson, Western Sydney).

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you complete the form below to RSVP.