Conférence Prof. Marco Gemignani, Universidad Loyola

Transnational families transcend borders that want to divide but only partially, and often just materially, achieve this goal. They also transcend – at least in part – conventional boundaries that regulate life in general, such as those based on space, time, relations, and affects. In transnationality, constructs such as established orders (e.g., geopolitical and national borders), social attributions (e.g., authorized vs. irregular migrants; distinctions among migrants, expats, sojourners, immigrants, or travelers), normalizing views (e.g., traditional families as more desirable than transnational families), and categories of space (e.g., here and there), time (e.g., now, before, in the future) and belonging (e.g., inside and outside of a family) are destabilized and reconstructed.  

In this workshop, we will apply the “trans” message of openness, transformation, and indeterminacy to methodology. This trans-methodology results in numerous ontological, epistemological, and theoretical provocations, which derive from a mosaic of theoretical inspirations, such as Deleuze’s concepts of difference and rhizomatic becoming (Adkins, 2015; Braidotti, 2013; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), Barad’s intra-actions and ontoepistemologies (Barad, 2007, 2015), post-qualitative (Koro-Ljungberg, 2015; Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; Østern et al., 2021) and non-representational inquiry (Fox & Alldred, 2021; Murris, 2021; Vannini, 2015), and decolonial border-thinking (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013; Mignolo & Walsh, 2018).

In the last part of the workshop, we will explore possible applications of transmethodologies to deconstruct and reconfigure some excerpts from interviews with caretakers in transnational families.