ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter enhances the overall contributions of the edited collection and shows the benefits of conceptualising migrant individuality as built through relational and everyday processes with others as well as within the structures, timings and spaces that mediate migrant social life. Highlighted are conceptual insights to understand migrant families in their fluidity and dynamism, the continuum of personal relationships in the lives of adult and young family members beyond normative configurations, and the emotional labour, with positive or negative motivations and outcomes, of doing family in migration. Significant in these insights are the contributors’ notions of ‘illegality’ in childhood, second generation return migration, home orbit and relational nationality. Next, promising research approaches and relational spaces for accessing the lives of migrant families are discussed. These include narrative research and storytelling, visual methods and composite case studies, virtual spaces (ICTs) and embodied practices (dance, sport). Also accentuated are ethical challenges when studying migrant family and personal relations with reflexivity and positionality as core concerns for the contributors in this volume. The chapter concludes by mapping out future research venues in relation to intersectionality, LGTBQ++ families and global forced migration that will enrich scholarship on migrant families.
