The project will investigate how informal networks of care constitute a social and cultural potential for children and adult caretakers who are involved in informal and illegal migration within and into Europe. The degree to which people's activities with in these networks are exposed to different formalizing undertakings- such as authorities' registration, control, labelling activity, service provision and interventions- will also be explored. However, instead of merely looking at how migrants are defined through their relation to the State or supra-national entities like the EU, we will primarily work within a methodological framework that emphasizes the social relations of the people involved in informal child migration and kinship care practices. The r esearch is organized around three areas of investigation, focusing on:
1. The social models of family and kinship that exist as integrated parts of arrangements and practices of marginal populations currently living in Europe. We will study the tensions between these practices and policy discourses and implementations which emphasize a biogenetic logic of kinship, the nuclear family, individual rights and citizenship.
2. The gendered experiences of social belonging and mutual dependencies related to wo men and men's caring work in informal kinship networks. We will explore the tendency within public bodies to render invisible the social relations constituting this kind of caring work.
3. People's access to knowledge through their informal transnationa l networks which help them to manage their marginal situation. We will investigate the mechanisms of social marginalization by looking at the restricted access people have to specialized knowledge about the conditions of governance which influence and fra me their lives.