ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some of the more pressing issues of the twenty-first century: (1) the impact of rapidly developing communication technologies on affective relatedness; (2) kinship dynamics in contexts of human mobility; and (3) the challenge of care in ageing societies. It explores the ways in which dispersed family members create (or fail to create) a sense of long-distance family life. It draws on theories of affect, space, sociality, materiality, and kinship, and builds on Janet Carsten’s conceptualization of kinship as relatedness. The analysis employs the perspectives of translocal relatedness and affective practice to understand how kin in different settings use communication technologies and mutual visits to experience and imagine kin sociality. Their entanglements are understood as mediated movements, not only across time and space, but also within and between aging bodies. The chapter also argues that, when exploring processes of relatedness in worlds of movement, we need to acknowledge individual, transitory aspects of world-making, and pay attention to universal existential features of the human condition.
