Love migration: narratives and materialities of mobile couple relationships

<p dir="ltr">Taking love as the analytical focus on mobile couple relationships, in this thesis I present a novel conceptualisation of migrant couples as ‘love migrants’. Focusing analytically on love shows that migrating becomes meaningful as an act of love and as a process through which love migrants distinguish their relationships from non-mobile couple relationships. Giving love a central place in this research allows me to show that love migrant couples draw on embodied knowledges and material belongings to understand their feelings and experiences of relationships.</p><p dir="ltr">My methodological approach is informed by feminist perspectives and gives primacy to participant voices. I use creative methods in which narrative interviewing is accompanied by a material approach where participants choose an object to talk about. This creates space for contemplation of emotional, tactile and non-verbal aspects.</p><p dir="ltr">The empirical chapters engage with the negotiation of migrating for love, materialities of love, and love migrant subjectivities. In Chapter 4, I show how migrating (or not) for love becomes a meaningful symbolic act and discuss the intricacies of how couples negotiate which partner will migrate and to where. I argue that the desire for day-to-day intimacy and touch is a central motivation for migration in love migrant lives. In Chapter 5, I argue that the objects chosen by couples indicate multiple and contingent understandings of love. I develop my argument that everyday touch and intimacy is important in love migrant lives through attention to the objects. In Chapter 6, I analyse how love migrant couples construct subjectivities through discourses of cosmopolitanism and argue that the objects chosen indicate a form of social capital related to love.</p><p dir="ltr">Overall, my perspective articulates an under-researched view on migration and allows insight into how couples experience and understand migration, adding complexity to existing frameworks. My research extends sociological understandings of love, intimacy and embodiment and, by connecting research on love with research on mobile couple relationships, explores the emotional side of couple relationships in mobility through the novel the concept ‘love migration’.</p>