Timescales of Transnational Social Reproduction

Social reproduction encompasses multiple time-bound processes: from the everyday political economy of caring, to cumulative investments in embodied individuals across their life course, and the longue durèé of social and ecological transformation. A growing literature on transnational social reproduction has emphasized the spatial reorganization of these processes during migration, with less attention paid to the temporal dimension. Drawing on extensive interviews with households participating in the Pacific Australia labor Mobility scheme, this article interrogates the discordant timescales of socially reproductive aspirations and outcomes implicit in guestworker migration. A common theme is the trade-off between present realities and future aspirations: the acceptance of depleted socially reproductive capacities, often narrated as “sacrifice,” to achieve longer-term goals that hinge on housing and education. Findings suggest the transient benefits of remittances obfuscate the cumulative undermining of longer-term socially reproductive processes essential to life-making among communities on the periphery of capitalist social relations.