SO FAR AND YET SO NEAR Present-Day Transnational Families

Abstract

Through the expansion and development of communication technologies, transnational families are presently experiencing that they are close despite the great geographical distances between them. On the basis of a qualitative study with transnational families, I show that this virtual closeness at a distance brings out new practices of familiarity, on the one hand, but also produces conflicts and dilemmas, on the other. While the new technologies of closeness enable forms of everyday interactions over great distances, the compression of time and space does not take place in a vacuum. Instead, family members are positioned at interfaces of structures of difference and inequality, which decisively influence access to and use of the new technologies and which have far-reaching consequences for the shaping of transnational family configurations.1