Contemporary Social Sciences 2

MAKING THE COUPLE: MIGRATION MIGRATION, DIASPORA, AND THE BOUNDARIES OF BELONGING

This course examines how people choose partners and build families under conditions of migration and diasporic dispersion, treating couple formation not as a private matter of personal preference but as a socially patterned practice, shaped by community norms, migration regimes, and the institutions — formal and informal — that organise who may plausibly meet whom.
The course is structured around a deliberate comparison. On one hand, it considers couples formed across national or cultural lines, examining how state migration regimes and competing normative expectations shape the negotiation of commitment, care, and belonging between partners drawn from different worlds. On the other, and in direct dialogue with this first case, it examines the equally significant but comparatively neglected phenomenon of endogamous pairing within diaspora communities: the matchmaking
networks, community introductions, and diasporaspecific platforms through which co-ethnic partners are brought together precisely in order to sustain linguistic, religious, or cultural continuity, even where partners already share a country of residence. Reading these two configurations together allows partner choice to be understood as a genuine social institution, governed by comparable logics of continuity, risk, and boundary-maintenance,  rather than treating cross-border marriage as exceptional and diaspora endogamy as merely traditional.
The course then follows these choices forward into their consequences for family life across generations, before turning, in its closing sessions, to the methodological challenges specific to this terrain — the sensitivity inherent to intimate disclosure, and the practical questions raised by fieldwork conducted across languages. 

Required reading :
• BALDASSAR, L. & MERLA, L. (eds.) (2014). Transnational Families, Migration and the Circulation of Care. Routledge.
• COHEN, R. (2022). Global Diasporas: An Introduction (3rd ed.). Routledge
• KALMIJN, M. (1998). «Intermarriage and Homogamy: Causes, Patterns, Trends.» Annual Review of Sociology, 24.
• PARREÑAS, R. S. (2005). Children of Global Migration: Transnational Families and Gendered Woes. Stanford University Press.
• WIMMER, A. (2013). Ethnic Boundary Making: Institutions, Power, Networks. Oxford University Press.