S. Cramsey. 2025."Uprooted Families:Caretaking, Belonging and Inheritance during and after Displacement,”Intro to a "Special Issue" of The International Migration Review,V.59/2:587-602.
Stories about those uprooted from their homes are almost always stories aboutfamilies, the youngest children within them and those who cared for them. Fromthe ancient world when grand deportations accompanied military defeats to con-temporary displacement unleashed by conflict, persecution, and climate change,forced movement unsettles family homes, creates new routines, and reshapes theconstant 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 lifethrough 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 repeleasy answers. The shock of human deracination, however, has the potention to ren-der the invisible visible and pushes caregiving into a more glaring light. The experi-ence of displacement, uprootedness, and forced movement reveals the invisiblework attached to various forms of caregiving explicitly. Motion, or more preciselythe legacy and history of motion, helps reveal facets of invisible work in thesecases and others thatfind space in this special issue and found voice at a conferencethat I convened at Leiden University in September 2022. The contents of this intro-duction and the articles which follows will demonstrate this repeatedly across geo-graphical, historical, and interdisciplinary contexts.