Paper short abstract:

The paper examines practices of keeping in touch between Italian professional migrants and their friends and family. Practices draw on and reconstruct kin and friend norms through political economies of control and choice that develop/disrupt relationships and life course/migrant trajectories.

Paper long abstract:

Affluent and skilled forms of migration are often linked to characterizations of contemporary social relations as highly reflexive, nomadic and individualized. Skilled migration is said, in part, to derive from, and is constitutive of, the market driven dissolution of moral forms of togetherness that generate fleeting and disposable personal relationships. This paper aims to offer a more nuanced understanding of scholarship that views personal relationships through a lens of flux and flow by examining the digital and physical practices of keeping in touch between Italian professional migrants in London and their friends and family living abroad.

In contrast to previous research that prioritizes either physical or digital mobilities, this study places both physical and digital practices of keeping in touch on equal ground. The paper finds that the availability of ICTs and low-cost air generate trans-local political economies of control and choice rooted in normative kinship and friendship structures. Through these political economies expectations/desires for both proximity and distance are constructed that in turn develop/disrupt relationships, migration trajectories, as well as the life course trajectories of friends and family. Instead of dissolving, many relationships are in fact strengthened through a co-constituted mobile ethics of self/other relations that align and situate imaginations trans-locally. In addition, contrary to the thesis of a marketization of relationships, tourism and leisure can become key means through which care practices are enacted. Other relationships, however, can struggle to adapt, contributing to a potential fossilization of relationships where loved ones remain important yet become mostly inactive.