Transnational migration within and out of Asia is one of the main drivers of contemporary social change in the region, as seen from its impact on the long-standing social institution of the ‘family’. The mutually constitutive effects of family and migration have spawned richly variegated research illustrating conceptual pathways such as ‘transnational family’ and ‘global householding’. The chapter discusses three interrelated strands of work in this arena. First, transnational families draw on ideologically laden imaginaries to give coherence to notions of belonging despite the physical dispersal of their members. Second, transnational families are also realised through lived experiences, where varying degrees of intimacy are negotiated across transnational spaces in the context of new communication technologies. Third, families may assume transnational morphologies, with the strategic intent of remittance generation as a means of economic survival or to accumulate social and economic capital so as to maximise social mobility for the family.
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