Techno-emotional mediations of transnational intimacy: social media and care relations in long-distance Romanian families

Donya Alinejad

doi:10.1177/0163443720972313

Abstract

The transnational circulation of intimate care is increasingly mediated by digital communications. Research conceptualizing long-distance emotional intimacy in terms of ‘care chains’ has been influential in understanding international care economies. Yet, this framework has limitations for theorizing the role of media in communications of care. With a focus on the ‘left-behind’ family members of Romanian economic migrants, this paper investigates how the use of social media apps and mobile devices within the context of a major intra-EU labor migration phenomenon helps people stay in touch with their transnationally mobile loved ones. It draws on interview material elicited among the close family members of Romanian labor migrants living in Bucharest and surrounding areas. The analysis focuses on the sensory role of social media platforms and the materiality of smartphones in shaping relations of long-distance emotional care. Showing how video calling and photo sharing practices produce emotional experiences that are specific to contemporary combinations of platform-device technicity and social sensitization, the paper argues for conceptualizing transnational care as a mediated emotional experience. By theorizing the role of media in how care is not merely transferred but felt through mediation, the paper demonstrates how media practices produce a techno-emotional mediation of transnational care.

Highlights

For contemporary transnational families, living at a distance from loved ones means emotional intimacy is increasingly shared through social media platforms on a routine basis
This paper has suggested that approaching transnational care in Romanian families as an emotional experience that is platform-mediated helps us better understand the formative role of emerging technologies in distant care relations
The device-software assemblages required for social media platform usage appear to produce the experiences of long-distance emotional care necessary for relationship maintenance rather than being a conduit for the circulation of care

Summary

Introduction

For contemporary transnational families, living at a distance from loved ones means emotional intimacy is increasingly shared through social media platforms on a routine basis. The spatial dimensions of the body’s situated-ness in the world is of compound importance when considering digitally mediated emotion in migration contexts, especially given the significance of geographic distance/proximity, embodied use of technological artefacts, and potentiality of being emotionally affected (Alinejad and Olivieri, 2020) This claim draws on the argument that while emotion is given meaning, culturally, the body is always its site (Gammerl et al, 2017). Scholarship on Romanian migrants’ digital communications has argued that everyday digital communications produce ways of maintaining relationships that form cosmopolitan subjectivities (Nedelcu and Wyss, 2016) and diasporic political identities (Trandafoiu, 2013) While this scholarly attention has tended to go to (middle class) migrants (see Ducu, 2018 for multi-sited research), the communication practices of those ‘left behind’ in the home country by their migrating loved ones are an understudied but important part of transnational families’ communication and care dynamics (Cabanes and Acedera, 2012). I further describe how the field research with these respondents was conducted

Methodology

Conclusion