Publication of IJGHMI
Digital Kinship and Fragmented Intimacies: Reconfiguring Family in Transnational Migrant Networks
Author : Dr. Priya Nair
Open Access | Volume 2 Issue 3 | Jul–Sep 2025
https://doi.org/10.63665/IJGHMI_Y2F3A005
How to Cite :
Dr. Priya Nair, "Digital Kinship and Fragmented Intimacies: Reconfiguring Family in Transnational Migrant Networks", International Journal of Global Humanities and Management Insights [IJGHMI], Volume 2, Issue 3 (Jul–Sep 2025), pp. 42–53.
Abstract
Abstract - In the era of unparalleled mobility and global interconnectedness, migrants around the globe negotiate kinship relations across world space. Information and communications technologies ranging from video conferencing and instant messaging to social networking sites mediate connectivity globally and produce what can be called "digital kinship." This essay discusses how digital technology makes intimacy and kinship possible and entwined for transnational migrant groups. Borrowing from transnational migration scholarship's conceptual frameworks, network theory, and sociology of emotions, this study examines how online communication intermediaries’ obligation, care, and emotional proximity. In an analysis of migrant stories and collective culture, the article distinguishes doubled character of digital kinship: on the one hand, digital media allow mundane family exchange and inventive care scripts; on the other, it allows disunified intimacies, affective labour, and tension in relations. Research uncovers ways in which digital kinship redraws traditional boundaries of the family and disrupts assumptions about co-presence, relational duration, and affective duty. In projecting onto the stage both the connective and interruptive capacities of digital mediation, the research begins a rigorous interrogation of twenty-first-century families, migration, and the remapping cartographies of intimacy of the digital age.
Keywords
Keywords - Digital kinship, Transnational migration, Fragmented intimacy, Mediated care, Emotional labour, Family networks, Communication technologies, Diaspora studies
Conclusion
A. Summary of Key Insights
This essay has examined transnational migrant networks of digital kinship ambivalence, discussing how technology mediation enables connectivity and yet produces fractured intimacies. Using South Asian, Latin American, and African diaspora case studies, it has shown that migrants and kin perform subtle strategies in exercising relational continuity, exchanging reciprocity, and performing care across distance. Digital kinship is autonomous but work-intensive, enabling continuity and producing relational, affective, and temporal complexities.
B. Broader Sociological and Anthropological Implications
The findings have significant implications for family sociology and anthropology, migration research, and technology studies. Digital kinship upsets conventional presuppositions about co-residence, presence, and relation boundary, mapping out the re-making of intimacy and care in globalized and technologically intermediated spaces. It highlights the labour, negotiation, and affective work in making familial networks live and underscores that contemporary family life transcends co-presence to involve digital, affective, and moral spaces.
C. Directions for Future Research
Future research needs to study long-term social and emotional impacts of virtual kinship, such as intergenerational influence, relational inequality, and effects of emerging technologies. Cross-cultural comparative studies in socio-economic, technological, and cultural settings can shed more light on diversity of digital kinship practice and consequences on family life. Second, using the interdisciplinarity of sociology, anthropology, migration studies, and media studies can enable better understanding of how digital media bring together experiences of intimacy, care, and relational responsibility in contemporary times. Digi-migrant kinship, in short, is an underlying, dynamic, and reformed aspect of transnational migrant life. It is continuity and disruption, possibility and boundary, a mirror of the interdependent co-production of technology, culture, and relational labour in the production of modern family life. In tracing these duals, this study helps to provide a more nuanced and more complete portrait of intimacy, care, and relational negotiation under conditions of globalizationReferences
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