International Migration Institute

Thomas Geisen presents his paper 'The complexity of migration: life-strategies of migrant family members and families' in Parallel session I(D) of the conference Examining Migration Dynamics: Networks and Beyond, 24-26 Sept 2013 In migration research the concepts of network and transnationalism gained new insights on migrants as social actors. Most important was, that decision-making and balancing processes became bound back to the individual and its network-relations. In this course a new emphasis was given to the relevance of the migrant family as an important social actor in migration processes. For transnationalism the family is the most important social unit, which binds individuals together in an intergenerational social context, often over long geographical distances. It seems, that the family has become the most emplematic social form of transnationalism. However, looking at concrete family practices it can be shown, that the family itself is embedded into wider social relations build within the commu