The paper explores the contested belonging under mobile and multi-local conditions of transnational families using an intersectional theoretical framing. Researchers conceptualizing migrants and their kin as transnational families have recently focused on institutional contexts that facilitate or hinder family solidarity and on practices and processes that maintain a sense of belonging across borders and in the mulita-local context. When capturing the specific aspects of care arrangements in transnational family contexts, a multi-local perspective helps us to understand families that are extended across national borders, putting a strong emphasis on locality as a source of identity and belonging. Analysing accounts of the second generation of men and women with migration backgrounds, we aim to gain insight into how does gender, race, age and other categories of difference reinforce modes of inequality in relation to the care arrangements used in migrant and transnational families. Using the intersectional inquiry, the paper analyses intersecting power relations contributing to the contested sense of belonging in the second generation of Vietnamese living in the Czech Republic. We conceptualize the categories of belonging as fluid, multiple and contested coming together, as differences are made and unmade, claimed and rejected. The intersectional analysis is based on 15 in-depth biographical narrative interviews and two focus groups with women and men of Vietnamese origin who grew up in the Czech Republic (CR) and are now are in their twenties and 150 online contributions collected from a closed Facebook ‘confession’ group on growing up in the CR as a person of Vietnamese origin. The preliminary results reveal that family forms that are transnational and multi-local result in belonging in-between two cultures and mutual ‘homes’. The everyday practices of care provision in transnational families are determined, to a great degree, by limited material possibilities and by institutional and relational boundaries. Moreover, the feeling of belonging is contested by othering practices in the host country and by the ethnic and spatial isolation of migrant communities same as gender stereotypes in both countries of origin and receiving country.

Lenka Formánková, Ph.D. works at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague since 2008. She received degrees in comparative social policy and psychology. In her work, she focuses mainly on social and public policy analysis and gender analysis of work and family relations, recently in context of migration. She serves as a principal researcher in research project entitled “Care arrangements and work-life reconciliation strategies of migrants in the Czech Republic” supported by Czech Science Foundation (GACR). Between 2015 and 2018, she worked in the Advisory Team for Family policy at the Ministry of Work and Social Affairs of the Czech Republic. She serves as a board member of Czech Women’s Lobby since 2016.

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