Place: C219, Middlesex University, London NW4 4BT

Against the backdrop of Brexit and ongoing migration crises, this seminar aims to address the theme of transnational family justice – individuals’ experiences and the regulation, at the national and international level, of citizenship rights and claims in terms of transnational family and intimate relationships. It seeks to explore and advance debates on social dynamics, public discourses, social policies and lived experiences of migration, multiculturalism, and intimate citizenship among transnational families in Western Europe. Given the emergent nature of the context and foci of the seminar, we take a broad approach to the definition of transnational family justice to encourage open and constructive dialogues in a burgeoning field. The seminar will be built around, but is not limited to, the following sets of questions:

• What are the prevalent public beliefs and social attitudes toward transnational families and intimate relationships?
• What rationales underlie state regulations of transnational family relations in terms of immigration, employment, and family policies?
• How do experiences of distinct migration trajectories, and particularly immigration policies and visa regimes, shape transnational intimate and family relationships?
• How do transnational families’ experiences of intimate citizenship affect their well-being (mental, physical, socioeconomic, etc.) in their host societies?
• How are transnational family justice systems sexualised and gendered? How may this affect the lived experiences of individuals of distinct gender and sexualities in different ways and potentially reinforce existing and create new gender inequalities in a transnational field?

 
Call for Papers
We invite papers that address the seminar’s core themes from postgraduate students, early-career and established scholars. Paper presentations will be approximately 20 minutes in length. Please email an abstract of up to 250 words to Yang Hu (yang.hu@lancaster.ac.uk) and Daniel Nehring (dfnehring@googlemail.com) and include your institutional affiliation and contact details.

We plan to publish a selection of quality papers from this event as a special issue in The Sociological Review. The deadline for the submission of
abstracts is May 26th, 2017.