Uprooted Families: Caretaking, Belonging, and Inheritance During and After Displacement

Abstract

Stories about those uprooted from their homes are almost always stories about families, the youngest children within them and those who cared for them. From the ancient world when grand deportations accompanied military defeats to contemporary displacement unleashed by conflict, persecution, and climate change, forced movement unsettles family homes, creates new routines, and reshapes the constant work which necessarily surrounds family life, from cradles to graves. Lately, I have become particularly fascinated by the continuous, often “invisible” care that offspring and those who raise them demand during both “extraordinary” and “ordinary” times. How do we as human beings sustain, cherish, and honor life through care and how does the invisible work associated with this care change over (all different types of) time? Like all great historical questions, these inquiries repel easy answers. The shock of human deracination, however, has the potention to render the invisible visible and pushes caregiving into a more glaring light. The experience of displacement, uprootedness, and forced movement reveals the invisible work attached to various forms of caregiving explicitly. Motion, or more precisely the legacy and history of motion, helps reveal facets of invisible work in these cases and others that find space in this special issue and found voice at a conference that I convened at Leiden University in September 2022. The contents of this introduction and the articles which follows will demonstrate this repeatedly across geographical, historical, and interdisciplinary contexts.