The Reciprocal Dynamics of Family Transformation through International Marriage Migration

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Dr. Jennifer Cole (University of Chicago) will undertake research on the role of changing marriage and family practices in shaping international migration. Most social scientific studies of migration have focused on national and international population movements and their effects at the national and regional levels. If marriages are considered at all in such studies, the existence of bi-national marriages is taken as a measure of host society assimilation. Dr. Cole will study international migration and marriage from the opposite perspective: the family-level and community-level processes that produce them. Such processes include situations where men and women use marriage and family reunification to enable migration and to maintain transnational relationships, on the one hand, while also serving their own local-level, community-level goals on the other. Looking at migration from the bottom-up will help to clarify causes and effects around an issue that is of central importance to both contemporary social science theory and effective migration policy.The research will be conducted in rural France because of the existence of a cohort of bi-national couples comprised of rural French men and African women from the island of Madagascar. Data will be collected using a variety of ethnographic methods including participant observation in the workplace, interviews with couples both together and separately, interviews with family members and community experts, and analysis of relevant materials from historical and comparative archives. The data will enable the researcher to elucidate how preexisting ideas of marriage, gender, and kinship affect and produce bi-national marriages; how the marriages, in turn, produce changed kinship and family practices; and how such arrangements affect the community integration of the couples and the communities into which they are integrated. Findings from the research will contribute to social science theory of the causes and consequences of contemporary migration. This research will further be of use to government officials and non-government workers interested in understanding the factors that promote migration and that contribute to, or hinder, the integration of migrants into their host societies.