Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot

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• PhD in Sociology
• Research Associate at Université Libre de Bruxelles

Depuis l’introduction de la perspective des chaînes globales de care a émergé un corpus de travaux sur les stratégies variées adoptées par les femmes migrantes pour remplir leurs obligations maternelles à distance ainsi que sur la situation de leurs enfants restés au pays. Les femmes migrantes semblent ainsi se trouver tout au bout des chaînes glob...

This Policy Brief aims to provide evidence-based recommendations for enhancing the EU’s regular migration system, focusing on the role of social networks in migrants’ trajectories. Drawing on 147 social network maps from selected EU and Asian countries, the analysis reveals that migrants predominantly rely on personal networks for practical, emotio...

Aiming to provide empirical evidence-based policy recommendations, the present Policy Brief draws from the analysis of 281 semi-structured interviews of aspiring (re)migrants collected in the framework of the Horizon Europe-funded research project “AspirE” (Asian prospects in re/migration to/within the EU). Interview analysis shows that certain gro...

Asians have been dynamically contributing to the EU’s economies being the second largest migrant population in the European Union (EU), but despite their contributions, they are treated unequally in EU mobility policies and in their implementation on the ground – an issue to be addressed as it is pivotal to the EU’s efforts to promote equal treatme...

Drawing from empirically grounded studies, the volume Situated Mixedness sheds light on the state of migration-related “intimate diversity”, that is, the simultaneous formation and existence of various configurations of conjugal mixedness. It examines this phenomenon in Belgium, a country in the European Union with a long history of immigration and...

Les travaux sur les vagues migratoires en Europe suggèrent que la manière dont les migrants entrent dans leur pays d’accueil affecte leur incorporation sociale dans le marché de travail de celui-ci. Ainsi, les femmes migrantes qui arrivent dans leur société d’accueil par une voie informelle se trouvent le plus souvent dans une situation irrégulière...

This introduction piece sets the tone of the volume on intimate diversity in Belgium in three ways. Firstly, it takes stock of scholarly works on the diversity of conjugal mixedness in the context of migration, which highlights general tendencies and remaining gaps to be addressed in future studies. By doing so, it brings to the fore the originalit...

The formation of Asian-Belgian couples undergoes reconfiguration through time in gender and social class terms. To understand the situations of these couples in Belgium, 35 social actors within selected Asian populations were interviewed in the present study. These individuals fulfil active roles in the said immigrant populations and have regular c...

This concluding section summarises the findings of the volume on intimate diversity in Belgium. It brings out two interesting empirical observations: first, contexts do structure people's lives but not all the time, as individuals are agentic beings with sources of support; and second, conjugal mixedness unfolds in a fluctuating manner and displays...

This Policy Brief stems from the analysis of the AspirE Project’s country reports on selected EU Member States (Belgium, the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Italy, and Portugal) and Asian territory/countries (Hong Kong and mainland China, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam). These reports examined policies covering labour migration, fa...

The question of why some people (re)migrate while others choose to stay remains one of the important preoccupations in migration studies. It underlines the need to further conceptualise transnational migration to identify the drivers behind individuals’ aspiration or intention to (re)migrate or stay where they are. Drawing from several migration th...

This commentary essay examines two salient debates arising simultaneously within gender studies and migration studies and shaping the direction of gender and migration research. Paying attention to the concept of social justice, it revisits the critiques around intersectionality approach and brings to the fore the urgency of adopting widely a refle...

<Open access: http://journals.openedition.org/moussons/11271> La littérature sur les familles ethniquement « mixtes » se focalise en général sur les expériences des couples, mais rarement sur celles de leurs enfants. Les quelques études sur ces derniers dévoilent leurs formes variées d’identité et la façon dont la société où ils résident et grandis...

This ethnographic story is part of a compendium of short stories focusing on spaces of intimacy that people experience as they migrate between continents and cultures. The said compendium is featured on the anthropological magazine "Otherwise" (ISSN 2752-3659) as part of its special issue on "Movement".

The literature on 'mixed' families (in which members are socially viewed as 'different' due to their varying ethnicities and/or nationalities) identifies several stakes of mixedness. One of them arises from childbirth, after which parents need to give name(s) to their offspring. How does the parent-child dyad understand the giving of names in their...

Recent global challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic, economic crises, and wars have not impeded transnational migration to continuously unfold. The question of why some people migrate while others choose to stay remains one of the important preoccupations in migration studies. It underlines the need to further conceptualise transnational migrati...

This is the review of the book "The Concealment Controversy. Sexual Orientation, Discretion Reasoning and the Scope of Refugee Protection" by Janna Wessels (2021, Cambridge University Press).

Le présent article examine les pratiques transnationales mobilisées pour « faire famille » par des hommes belges vivant en Thaïlande, la plupart étant en couple avec une ou un partenaire thaïlandais. Certains de ces hommes ont encore en Belgique des membres de leur famille de naissance et/ou de la famille nucléaire qu’ils ont fondée lors d’une préc...

Researchers' reflexivity usually focuses on the spatiality and sociality of their ethnographic fieldwork. As a result, the temporal context of their positionality, whereby their various identities interact with one another at different research phases, is often overlooked. This paper adopts an agentic intersectional approach and draws from our sepa...

This chapter analyzes the ways in which migrants maintain, redefine and reinforce their conceptions of home through various homemaking strategies. For this purpose, we revisit three fast-growing scholarships focusing respectively on transnational families in which the members are geographically separated due to migration; on migrant families settle...

Insider family citizens—that is, people who, according to their nationality/legal status and the possession of crucial resources for the settlement of their relatives in a foreign context—occupy an especially important place within a wide and diversified set of family relationships. Drawing on qualitative interviews with migrant women and children...

Les études sur les migrants philippins en France ont dévoilé comment leur organisation autour de l’Eglise catholique dite « philippine » leur permet de faire face à leur situation souvent précaire dans leur pays d’accueil. Malgré le rôle important de la religion dans la vie de ces migrants, très peu de travaux se sont penchés sur cette question, sp...

Dans la nouvelle division internationale du travail reproductif, les femmes migrantes jouent un rôle prépondérant dans le fonctionnement des foyers dans leurs société d’origine et d’accueil. Pourtant, ces migrantes vivent le plus souvent en marge de la société. Comment ces femmes deviennent-elles vulnérables à l’exclusion sociale et aux diverses fo...

Since the 1980s, many Filipino labour migrants in the world have been women. In France, the Filipino migrant population is largely composed of migrant mothers who live in urban areas, work in the domestic service sector and have an irregular migration status. This chapter revisits the 'global care chains' debate through examination of the caregivin...

The migration flows connecting Thailand and Europe have constructed social spaces in which different stereotypes regarding Thais and Europeans emerge, perpetuate, and circulate, thereby affecting to various extents the lives of these individuals. To challenge these stereotypes, the present special issue takes into account the mechanisms of social c...

The Thai migration to Belgium is numerically a woman-led phenomenon, which has captured social attention for the last decades. This attention entails stereotypes about Thai migrant women as ‘workers’ in the intimate industry and/or ‘exotic wives’ of Belgian men. To challenge these stereotypes, the present paper explores the often-ignored dimension...

The interview with Mrs. Chongcharoen Sornkaew Grimsmann, a long-term member and former president of Thai Women Network in Europe (TWNE), was originally con-ducted in English over email by Sirijit Sunanta and Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot in July 2022. It was supplemented by an online interview (via WebEx) in Thai by Sirijit Sunanta in November 2022. Mrs....

Eigensinn, 1(1), 75-86 — Les études sur la mixité conjugale dans le contexte migratoire sont rarement conduites dans les pays en voie de développement, alors même que ces derniers connaissent depuis quelques années un phénomène migratoire important en provenance des pays développés, orienté vers la formation de couples mixtes. Comment les pays en...

Through the lens of my research experiences, I review here the book of Janna Wessels entitled "The Concealment Controversy. Sexual Orientation, Discretion Reasoning and the Scope of Refugee Protection" (2021, Cambridge University Press). This review has been published in the Blogs of the Migration & Diversity Research Centre of the Vrije Universite...

Feminist scholars from different disciplines introduced gender perspectives in migration studies and contributed to the burgeoning of what is known today as “gender and migration” scholarship. More than four decades after the development of this scholarship, several questions can be raised: what is the present state of broader migration studies? Ar...

The emotional, social, and economic challenges faced by migrants and their families are interconnected through complex decisions related to mobility. Tangled Mobilities examines the different crisscrossing and intersecting mobilities in the lives of Asian migrants, their family members across Asia and Europe, and the social spaces connecting these...

Studies on international marriages involving women from economically developing countries show that many of them generally migrate to and settle in their partner’s country of origin. Their motivation is most often linked to their desire to improve economically and socially their lives, which suggests that marriage can trigger spatial and social cla...

This Introduction to the edited volume Tangled Mobilities presents its observation that the dynamic spatial movements of people across state frontiers take place alongside the circulation of affects and the transformation of individual’s personhood as they position themselves within their cross-border social spaces. This situation entails emotional...

This paper highlights the originality and scholarly contributions of the present Special Issue on transnational divorces in three ways. First, it examines two sets of related literature and situates the Special Issue within them: one on divorces, in general, and the other on divorces in transnational families (also called here “transnational divorc...

Scholars most often adopt qualitative data-gathering methods, notably interviews, to access the lifeworld of “mixed” families. Nonetheless, when research questions require vivid details about their lives, other data-collection techniques may be needed. “Intimate” research methods, characterised by proximate contacts and interactions with “mixed” co...

The literature on the transnational practices of the ‘second generation’ mainly focuses on children whose parents are migrants, which neglects the offspring of ‘mixed’ couples with different nationalities and/or ethnicities. This chapter addresses this gap by examining the links that children of Filipino-Belgian and Thai-Belgian couples maintain an...

The rise of mobility and transnationalism perspectives in the social sciences has contributed to a burgeoning literature on the cross-border movements of people. Gender as a conceptual lens has increasingly taken a central stage in the analyses, unveiling unequal power relations as well as unmasking the often-hidden macro-social processes and struc...

As divorces take place increasingly across national borders, many former partners find themselves in complex situations entangled in more than one state during which some categories of difference intersect, (re)creating inequalities and precarity. Through a socio‐legal perspective combined with transnational and intersectional approaches, the prese...

The Filipino parental migration results in many children “left behind” under the care of kin, but subsequent family reunification may trigger emotional adjustments in the child-caregiver dyad. Drawing from ethnographic fieldworks in France, Italy and the Philippines, this paper aims to shed light on these adjustments. Examining the case of 1.5-gene...

A migração familiar filipina resulta em muitas crianças “deixadas para trás” aos cuidados de parentes, mas reunificações familiares subsequentes podem disparar ajustes emocionais na díade criança-cuidador(a). Partindo de trabalhos de campo etnográficos realizados na França, na Itália e nas Filipinas, este artigo visa lançar luz sobre essas mudanças...

Studies on the marital break-up of “mixed couples” in which partners have different nationalities and/or ethnicities pay little attention to how individual partners, notably the one with a migration background, experience the law and institutions concerning their children. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews with Filipino women in B...

The literature on migrations in the Asia-Europe migration corridor focuses on the migration experiences of the Asian adult migrants who moved in Europe, whereas the viewpoints of their family members remain largely understudied. This tendency highlights the need for studies centered on spouses and children. Moreover, scholarly works mostly concentr...

Studies on “mixed” couples focus mainly on women’s perspectives, which results in the neglect of the viewpoints of men. Addressing this empirical gap, this research note investigates the case of Belgian and Dutch men in (former) relationship with Filipino women, and Filipino men (currently or previously) married to Belgian/Dutch women. Ethnographic...

La transmission intergénérationnelle des pratiques alimentaires au sein des familles dites « mixtes » dont l'un des parents est migrant demeure peu explorée dans les travaux sur l'alimentation dans le contexte migratoire. Afin d'explorer cette question, cet article examine le cas des familles mixtes de migrantes péruviennes et philippines en Belgiq...

The numerical dominance of women within the Thai population in Belgium raises the question of how gender, as a category of difference and as a norm, influences Thai women’s decision to enter in a ‘mixed’ marriage, to migrate, and to ‘do family’ in their transnational social spaces. Drawing from a qualitative study of Thai women in ‘mixed’ couples i...

The children of transnational families have attracted important scientific attention for the last decades, which reflects the social concern about their well-being as they grow up separated from one or both of their parents. When family reunification takes place in the receiving country of the migrant parents, children themselves become migrants. H...

The Philippines is one of only two states in the world in which absolute divorce remains largely impossible. Through its family laws, it regulates the marriage, family life and conjugal separation of its citizens, including its migrants abroad. To find out how these family laws interact with those in the receiving country of Filipino migrants and s...

Partant du constat que la fabrique de l’altérité dans les mobilités transnationales est trop souvent saisie sous l’angle des migrations Sud-Nord, ce dossier propose de s’intéresser aux mobilités au sein du Sud globalisé. Les articles rassemblés dans ce dossier explorent des espaces géographiques variés et des formes diverses de mobilité et de circu...

Studies on the so-called “second generation” mainly focus on individuals whose parents are both migrants. This overlooks the situation of the children of “mixed” couples, in which one parent is a migrant and the other a citizen of the country in which they live. These mixed-parentage young people mostly inhabit cross-border social spaces that conne...

Les familles « mixtes » des migrants philippins en Belgique offrent un terrain d’étude intéressant d’un point de vue empirique car les Philippines sont un pays multilingue où sont actuellement parlées plus de 100 langues différentes, tandis que la Belgique est quant à elle un pays plurilingue divisé en trois communautés linguistiques. Du fait de ce...

This paper undertakes two analytical enterprises to reflect on children’s place(s) in transnational families. At the macro level, it traces the developments of how children have been socially and scientifically viewed through time, while highlighting the cross-fertilization of knowledge between migration studies and children and childhood studies....

As states increasingly regulate ‘mixed’ family formation, self-positioning has become central to the lives of migrant spouses, including women. To understand this process, the present article investigates the mothering techniques of Filipino and Thai migrant women in Belgium, that is, the decisions, actions and ways of being they consciously enact...

Marriages between partners with different nationalities and/or ethnicities are continuously attracting the controlling gaze of many states at the global level. Studies have demonstrated how states govern the intimate lives of ‘mixed’ couples through migration and social policies as well as family laws. When ‘mixed’ couples break up, the way states...

Although marriage migration is on the rise, the global householding of migrant spouses in 'mixed' families remains largely understudied. The present chapter attempts to address this empirical gap by examining gender and intergenerational dynamics in the mixed families of Thai women in Belgium. Using the 'care circulation' analytical framework, we i...

With the aim to better understand how "care regimes" (that is, social protection systems) affect migrants' lives, the present article draws from three separate studies on migrant Filipinas in Europe. The cases of three of these women unveil the important characteristic of the care regime in their country of origin and that in their respective recei...

Informed by the phenomenological approach to the study of social phenomena, this chapter examines the way migrants succeed in overcoming the macro-level hurdles to their spatial mobility such as the restrictive migration policies of many migrant-receiving countries. It argues that in order to grasp the power, logics and limitations of the state, it...

This chapter examines the routes that lead Thai migrant women to the acquisition of the marital citizenship of their receiving country. Drawing from an ethnographic fieldwork with Thai migrant women in Belgium, the present chapter identifies the different places, intermediaries and circumstances that allow these women to meet their future Belgian h...

While marriage has lost its popularity in many developed countries and is no longer an obligatory path to family formation, it has gained momentum among binational couples as states reinforce their control over human migration. Focusing on the case of Southeast Asian women who have been epitomized on the global marriage market as ‘ideal’ brides and...

Studies of family reunification suggest that migrants’ decisions whether to pursue family reunion vary across migration patterns. To explain why, this article draws from the literature on social reproduction in the context of migration and examines two cases of mother-child reunification (or lack thereof) in the Filipino labour and Thai marriage mi...

La migration des femmes philippines et thaïlandaises en Belgique entraîne le plus souvent la formation de familles dites « mixtes ». Lorsque ces femmes et/ou leur conjoint belge ont un enfant d’une relation précédente, leur famille est à la fois « mixte » et recomposée. Le présent article vise à comprendre l’interaction entre conjugalité et pluripa...

This Special Issue engages two strands of scholarship in dialogue in a meaningful way: intersectionality and transnational studies. This introductory article outlines the ways in which we envision this project as a part of the ongoing process of cross-fertilisation between these two camps and build on these debates. As a step in this direction, we...

Empirical studies of Filipinos in France focus on migrant women domestic workers and consequently tend to overlook other components of the Filipino population in this country. Departing from these previous studies, I examine the case of migrant Filipinas in binational unions, that is, relationships based on marriage or cohabitation (legally registe...

L’étude des familles transnationales requiert souvent un travail ethnographique de terrain qui dépasse les frontières nationales et culturelles. Cette approche permet aux chercheurs de bien comprendre la complexité des relations et des liens que les migrants et leurs familles entretiennent à travers le temps et l’espace. Pourtant, une telle entrepr...

The complexities of the childhood experiences of migrant children who experience growing up in at least two sociocultural dimensions pose analytical and methodological challenges to studies of migration, transnational families and childhood. In this chapter, we lay out the analytical framework we developed in the course of our collaborative study o...

The labor migrations of fathers and mothers within or from Southeast Asia often result in parent-child separations that end either when migrant parents return definitively to their country of origin or when they make their children immigrate in their receiving country. In the latter case, the so-called “left-behind” children suddenly become “1.5-ge...

The migration of Filipino parents to France triggers a family separation that ends when the migrant parent decides to return permanently to his country of birth or when his children formerly "left behind" come and join him in France. These children then become part of the "generation 1.5" - immigrants who spent part of their childhood or adolescenc...

As a result of the dynamic family migration occurring on a global scale, an increasing number of children currently migrate to various countries. While some studies on migrant children recently started to shed light on their subjectivities and agencies (for example, Gardner, 2012; Knörr, 2005; Ní Laoire, Carpena-Méndez, Tyrrell, & White, 2011; Veal...

The social incorporation and identity construction of immigrants’ children have been well documented in many receiving countries in North America and in Europe (Kirszbaum, Brinbaum, Simon, & Gezer, 2009; Portes & Rumbaut, 2001; Rumbaut, 1994; Zanfrini & Asis, 2006). This is notably the case for the ‘second generation’, a group that comprises not on...

Recent studies on the migratory flows of women have shown the impacts of migration and separation on their so-called “transnational family”. These studies put considerable attention on the migrant women themselves and on their children left in their country of origin, but often overlook the situation of other family members such as the husbands “le...

Contemporary parental migrations have resulted in the rise of many transnational families characterized by solidarity despite family separation across geographical distance. Children of these families have attracted strong scientific attention for the last twenty-five years, which reflects the existing social concern about their well-being as they...

Recent studies on immigrant families have demonstrated how the migration status of parents influences their process of family reunification. In the current context of restrictions on family-related migrations in many receiving countries, concretising their family reunification projects often appears challenging to migrant parents and their children...

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Femmes de ménage, employés de maison, cuisiniers, jardiniers, aides à domicile, gardes d'enfant : ce sont quelques-unes des nombreuses fonctions exercées en France par les immigrés philippins en réponse aux besoins des foyers français et étrangers. Cette population immigrée socialement peu visible se compose majoritairement de femmes, pour la plupa...

Les migrations parentales, définies ici comme le mouvement géographique du père et/ou de la mère dans un but de travail, ont fait l’objet de nombreuses études scientifiques ces trente dernières années. En effet, cette vague migratoire suscite des questionnements, notamment concernant ses effets indésirables sur le bien-être des enfants restés au pa...

Les vagues migratoires féminisées actuelles se caractérisent par une participation de plus en plus importante de mères seules soutiens de famille. De nombreuses mères issues de pays en développement d'Asie, d'Amérique du Sud et des Caraïbes viennent en effet travailler dans les pays développés (notamment dans le secteur de services à la personne) p...

Human security in labor migration has mainly been analyzed in the literature from the perspective of the migrants' receiving countries, which has overshadowed the point of view of the migrants' sending countries. Focusing on the case of the Philippines, this chapter examines the divergent positions of the state and of non-state actors to find out h...

The male experience of women’s migration: the case of Filipino husbands who remain in the country The migration of mothers has recently become the subject of increased social attention because it generates a reconfiguration of power relations in the family. However, research until now was focused on the impact of this migration on the children left...

Religious belongings help migrants, especially irregular ones, to confront the precariousness of their lives. France represents a peculiar case because it is a secular country where undocumented migrants have access to free medical care and their children to compulsory education. The present paper explores Filipino migrants' religious space in Fran...

Recent studies on transnational mothering have explored the various strategies migrant women use to negotiate their absence from home; however, there is limited knowledge on how migration status diversifies transnational mothering practices. To fill this gap, I conducted in-depth interviews and observations of Filipino migrant mothers working in th...

After World War II, Filipino Nikkeijin suffered social and economic difficulties. As a result, they tried to conceal their Japanese origin to escape reproaches and teasing. Their shared experience of social discrimination mobilized them into associations that helped them to socially empower themselves. To explore the process of their empowerment, t...

Si les immigres philippins en Europe de l’Ouest se concentrent dans le secteur du travail domestique, l’entreprenariat est devenu, depuis une quinzaine d’annees, un debouche pour une minorite d’entre eux. Cet article analyse le developpement de commerces philippins a Paris et decrit leur insertion dans les differents reseaux qui structurent la popu...

This article documents the emergence of self-employment among Filipino migrants in Paris, a pattern of economic incorporation that departs from the predominance of Filipinos in the domestic work sector in Western Europe. After presenting the characteristics of Filipino migration to France, the article describes the embeddedness of Filipino entrepre...