Mobile Professionals and Families

Career expatriates, highly skilled (temporary) migrants, privileged migrants, mobile professionals, transnational corporate elites, or digital nomads: these are terms that have been used to describe highly educated professionals who move abroad voluntarily for career reasons. They are relatively well-paid professionals who do not necessarily stay in the destination permanently but move on after a few months or years.

While many countries welcome these skilled professionals, national immigration policies and multinational employers tend to focus on the worker as a detached and highly mobile individual whose talents and expertise are needed. Less attention has been paid to the fact that these experts are embedded in family relations and often have children and spouses/partners who either move abroad with them or stay behind. When the literature does center the expatriate worker’s family members, it does so with concepts like “Third Culture Kids” or “trailing spouses” that tend to frame mobility as a disruption that must be managed as opposed to considering how transnational mobility constitutes family life in particular ways.

This symposium focuses on the experiences of mobile professionals and their families. We seek fresh perspectives to explore new configurations of work, mobility, and family life through the prism of transnational movement and in the context of an uneven global economy. Contributions discussing the experiences and situations of internationally mobile children or partners and spouses are particularly welcome, as are reflections on the multiplicity and heterogeneity of the phenomenon.

We aim to address several questions in this symposium, including but not limited to:

    Who is privileged and in relation to whom, and how does this relate to the experiences of the accompanying or left-behind family members?

    How is family life performed through transnational mobility, and not just in spite of it?

    Who becomes an internationally mobile professional, for what reasons and what are the short- and long-term consequences of this for their families?

    How are mobile professionals and their families situated in the shifting arrangements of work in the aftermath of the pandemic and rise of platform capitalism?

    How do race, class, and gender intersect in the “doing” of family life as professional workers move abroad and across national borders?

    How are mobile and digital technologies affording new ways of parenting, shaping experiences of childhood, or enabling alternative performances of family life on the move? What are the limitations of such technologies with regard to family-making in transnationally mobile contexts?

    How do children and/or spouses/ partners experience the transnationally mobile lifestyles?

    What are the potential methodological dilemmas (and possible solutions to them) of studying families, including young children, on the move?

The symposium is free of charge but participants are required to pay for their own travel, accommodation and food.

The symposium consists of a keynote lecture, a presentation of the project “Expatriate Childhood” (by Mari Korpela), participants’ presentations and discussions.

The keynote lecture on Thursday January 18th will be given by Professor Jennie Germann Molz (College of the Holy Cross, USA). The title of her lecture is “Digital Nomad Families: From Worldschoolers to Mobile Mompreneurs”.