Loving Attachment: Regulating Danish Love Migration (LOVA)

Loving Attachment: Regulating Danish Love Migration (LOVA)

The unfolding European migration crises illustrates the urgent need for new conceptualizations and discursive frameworks to qualify our understandings of how and to what effect different forms of migration are conceptually and politically governed. The LOVA collective research project inve­sti­gates the ways in which the psy­cho­logical and juridical concepts of attachment have come to regu­late Danish love migration. LOVA is structured around four individual and two collaborative projects, which pro­vide synergic, interdisciplinary perspectives on how the concept of attac­hment governs love mi­gra­tion. In eve­ry­day use, the develop­mental psycho­logical concept of attachment (‘tilknyt­ning’) denotes an indivi­du­al’s capacity to form social bonds. Over the past 15 years, how­ever, Danish migration legi­sla­­tion has operationalized the concept of attachment as a means of governing types of migra­tion com­monly understood as involving relationships of love: i.e. family reunification, trans­natio­nal adoption, and trans­national migration marriages.

Projektet har i 2016 opnået bevilling fra Det Frie Forskningsråd | Kultur og Kommunikation til DFF-Forskningsprojekt 2.