The MoBoBe project focuses on migrants' practice of post-mortem repatriation. It coins the concept of “transnational death money” to investigate how the economic arrangements that permit repatriation function as a foundational dynamic in transnational families. It shows how migrants use transnational death monies and how the uses connect them shaped to kin and acquaintances across borders, to states, and markets. It evidences what kind of transnational subjectivities the different monies produce. It confronts migrants' practices of repatriation to state agents' attempts to intervene in the process and in market actors' quest to reap profit from it. Proceeding in four national locations, it shows how transnational death money shapes and is shaped by the social relations and cultural environments in which it circulates and by the social positionings of its handlers. By making repatriation possible, it conquers insecurities over belonging and makes transnational lives liveable.

2022

2025