Asynchronous togetherness: What international research collaborations can learn from transnational families
DemiKnow is a project that has explored decision making for migration and intergenerational relationships in transnational families. We have asked how people moving to form transnational or translocal families, whether through student mobilities or grandparent migration, keep in touch with loved ones across distance and create new ways of interacting and exchanging care under changed conditions.
In parallel to these more traditional elements of a migration research project, this study has also explicitly sought to document and reflect on how a project involving teams in multiple national contexts is conducted, what are the barriers and enablers to doing good research at each stage of the process. We have found that many of the practices of collaborating international research teams mirror the practices of transnational families.
Multimodal communication and togetherness
Emails and social media – in both research teams and transnational families, group emails and social media groups, e.g., WhatsApp, are mechanisms to ensure everyone gets the same information. Back channels or smaller group threads can be used to include or exclude group members where their input is not needed or desired. In both research teams and transnational families, these smaller group communication strategies can be advantageous and emotionally responsible (sparing other members from unnecessary work, stress or worry) but can also have disadvantages (not everyone has the same information, messages may be relayed and distorted in the process, some members of families or teams may feel ‘left out’).
Video calls – these can be scheduled around planned events, for research teams this include bimonthly meetings and symposia/conferences, while for transnational families scheduled calls may be more or less frequent, annual festivals or birthdays, weekly catch ups or meals together. They may include large groups, though these are sometimes disjointed and hard to follow. Or they may be with smaller groups and therefore more intimate and effective for information sharing. Chats between individual family members. Mehru’s ‘interviews’ for the video blogs deepening some relationships.
Visits – some people travel and others don’t. The embodied experience, gifts knowledge, and decisions of a visit. Visitors act as proxies for others who cannot travel at that time, sharing the proximate togetherness.
Asynchronous information sharing and decision making
Because members of transnational families are rarely all together in the same room at the same time, they must develop other ways of sharing information and engaging in collaborative decision making. The various modes of communication and togetherness that are used, enable these processes, but they do so in ways that are uneven, sometimes unfair, that may replicate proximate relationships of power and influence, or that may subvert them by dint of differential access to transport, communication technologies, etc.
Unanticipated friendships and alliances may emerge, such as between grandchildren who have never met, or research assistants tasked with coordinating group meetings. In the DemiKnow project, the exchange students are perhaps the most well embedded across multiple teams – especially Varsha who now knows the IIMAD and ECU teams intimately but also got to spend time with Rica and Ashika while in Melbourne. Unexpected nodes in family or team networks taking on particular significance or roles.
Intentional mutuality of purpose
Transnational families do not stay together by magic. Ties of blood and marriage, while powerful cultural signifiers of collective and usually sites of emotional attachment, are nonetheless insufficient in and of themselves to produce consistent and committed togetherness over time. Families maintain connection across distance and time through intentional, explicit, and often clearly communicated and reiterated shared purpose/s and narrative/s. This intentional mutuality of purpose sustains the care labour required to enact the practical dimensions of asychronous togetherness.
Barriers at multiple scales. Some team / family members may be less able to participate in multimodal communication and togetherness, and this can vary across time. This September I was unable to join my family in Europe, missing the first opportunity in over a decade to share physical space with both my adult siblings, because I was caring for my father who had had a stroke. Mehru was unable to come to ISA in June, missing our first in-person DemiKnow symposium, because she was caring for her husband post operation. Covid policies kept transnational families apart for years, perhaps most keenly felt in China and Australia. Covid policies continue to limit the capacity of some of our team to travel for work and enjoy in-person meetings. Institutional administration (looking at you, ethics and finance) can hinder, slow or stall international research collaborations. Applying for visas, meeting residency or work requirements can be painful, drawn-out and energy intensive dimensions of doing family across borders.
This is perhaps where the most valuable lessons lie for international research collaborations. Families and relationships take work. Teams and relationships take work. Where barriers arise, families and teams find adaptive strategies and alternate modes of togetherness to respond.
