(Im)mobilities of transnational ageing care: negotiating separation, solidarity and conflict within Brazilian families
Dora Sampaio
- completed -
In her project at MPI-MMG, Dora looks at the (im)mobilities of transnational ageing care and family re-negotiations across borders with a focus on ageing Brazilian parents and their migrant offspring in North America and Europe. She concentrates on embodied and emplaced experiences of ageing and care constructed over distance. She interviewed and followed the lives of Brazilian migrants in London, U.K. and Boston, U.S. in connection to their ageing parents in Brazil. She traced and visually documented family negotiations, solidarities, and tensions in contexts in which physical mobility across borders or family reunion is not always possible. She seeks to shed light on three sets of questions with wider disciplinary relevance: first, geographies and (im)mobilities of ageing care: how is transnational ageing care enacted and experienced in contexts of (im)mobility and (un)documented lived? What is the potential for new technologies to generate a presence in contexts of absence? Second, intersectionalities and inequalities of ageing: what new family and gender roles can be engendered in contexts of migration? What new intergenerational relationships can be contrived? What new care-related migration flows may emerge in response to children’s emigration? How do gendered, classed, and racialized bodies and identities play into this? Third, temporalities of ageing and migration: to what extent are the temporalities of ageing and the temporalities of migration mutually inducing?