Join the Department of Social Sciences for this Great Problems, Great Minds seminar series event featuring guest speaker C. Cindy Fan, a professor of geography and vice provost of international studies and global engagement at UCLA this Thursday, September 22 starting at 12:40 p.m. online.
Migration may entail short-term separations among family members, but split households that last beyond the short term are in fact quite common. This paper draws on selected studies on migration, especially migration for work and empirical cases of internal migration in the Global South, to highlight householding, household strategies, and multi-locational households. Experiences of households that straddle multiple locations shed light on circular migration and question if one-way and permanent migration is inevitable. These studies illustrate gender selectivity of migration, gender division of labor, and how women and men involved in migration reconstruct gender roles without challenging patriarchal ideology. They also examine intergenerational perspectives, including remittances and care, and the experiences of left-behind children, migrant children and new-generation migrants. The research reviewed supports the notion that contemporary migration research and theories should pay more attention to split households.