Rebecca King-O'Riain

This study examines the subjective experience of discrimination across the adult population in Ireland. The research is based on analysis of the special module on Equality, which was included in the Quarterly National Household Survey in 2004. The survey examines ...

... DOI: 10.1080/00750770802076992 Rebecca Chiyoko King ... although many immigrants indeed do have ties to home and away (or sending and receiving countries) they also have ties and orientations manifested in everyday transnational practices beyond just these two poles. ...

Within the field of transnationalism and globalization, studies have tended to focus on the flow of people, ideas and goods (Giddens 2003, Beck 2011, Fitzgerald 2008). Within the field of migration this has meant importantly an increasing focus on studies of gender, migration and emotion (Brooks and Simpson 2013; Svasek and Skrbis 2007, Baldassar 2008). However, these studies tend to focus on the context of migration and how that shapes decisions around migration and belonging without focusing on the effect of migration on emotions themselves. Through ethnographic narrative interviews with 36 mixed transnational couples, this article analyses how the emotion of love is understood and practiced within some 'global families' (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2014). The article finds that for the mixed intercultural couples interviewed here, distance played a role in defining and confirming love (love at a distance) and was often seen as a reason to migrate or move (crossing distance for love) as a test or proof that love was real. These different cultural meanings of love show how distance could increasingly play a role in how we define and practice love today.

In this article I explore how transnational families, living in Ireland, use Skype to stay in touch with their loved ones. From 2010 to 2012, data were collected from a purposive, but broad sample of 36 qualitative ethnographic interviews with mixed couples (one partner identifies as Irish and one does not), throughout various parts of the Republic of Ireland. I outline how the use of Skype allows transnational families to create spaces of transconnectivity as they practise simultaneous and ongoing belonging across significant temporal and geographic distances. This affects how people ‘do’ emotions. These emotion practices often consist not only of ‘affect storage’ but also of what I call emotional streaming, promoting ongoing interaction over distance, which includes keeping Skype turned on for long periods of time. Through these attempts to try to recreate everyday practices via continuous use of Skype, transnational emotions of love and longing are deintensified.