Transnational Family Relationships of Migrant Academics in Britain

This research investigates how migrant academics in Britain maintain their family and kinship relationships across national borders. Drawing on Morgan’s (1996) concept of ‘family practices’, it aims to explore how and in what ways -and also under the influences of which factors- migrant academic staff working at British universities navigate their familial and kin relationships transnationally.
Within the scope this research project, forty five life-story interviews were conducted with migrant academics who were from twenty-seven different countries in the world. Additionally, sociogram maps are used as embedded in qualitative interviews. Migration background (as European or non-European countries); gender; age; the length of the stay in the UK; academic position/contract type; annual income level and marital/relationships status were given significance in forming the sample. Since the fieldwork overlapped with the global Covid-19 outbreak, five of the interviews were face-to-face while forty interviews were conducted online.
Applying thematic analysis technique, this research reached four overarching conclusions about how and in what ways migrant academics negotiate their family and kinship ties transnationally. First, despite migrant academics’ ‘floating ties’ (Wilding, 2014, p. 17) that are scattered across different parts of the world, academics’ decisions are still anchored by considerations of space and spatiality. Second, it is found that time and temporality are deeply entrenched in academics’ migration and mobility trajectories; their individual life-course progressions and everyday life activities involving transnational family practices. Third, this research shows the significance and prevalence of friendship ties operating together with other familial and personal transnational ties to exchange care and emotional support across distances. Finally, migrant academics tend to have diverse, multi-local, fluid transnational networks involving both professional and familial, personal ties.