Navigating the Intersections of Migration and Motherhood in Online Communities: Digital Community Mothering and Migrant Maternal Imaginaries

Abstract

This thesis explores the experiences of contemporary migrant mothers in Australia, through the lens of their online communities. Facebook groups created by and for migrant mothers from particular national, ethnic or linguistic communities have proliferated in the last decade. The analysis of these groups acts as a springboard to investigate how migrant mothers in Australia experience and respond to migration and motherhood, centring on four key areas: community-building and leadership; friendship and sociality; the emotions of motherhood and migration; and migrant mothers’ maternal practices, narratives and imaginaries.Literature and concepts from three distinct fields – motherhood studies, migration research and digital sociology – inform the research. Understandings of migration are extended and troubled by highlighting the importance of maternal social connection, not simply in relation to their partners and children or to the labour market, but also between mothers. The investigation of the role of migrant maternal Facebook groups in the everyday lives of migrant mothers also extends scholarship in digital sociology by bringing feminist, matricentric (A. O'Reilly 2016) and intersectional approaches into conversation with key themes relating to belonging, mobility and connection.The thesis involved a scoping exercise which mapped Australian online migrant mother’s groups, an online survey of women ‘mothering away from home’ , and semi-structured interviews with 41 migrant mothers from ten different countries living in Sydney and Melbourne, who were members of migrant mothers’ online groups. Fifteen of the interviewees held an administrator role in their group, and the digital and emotional labour involved in managing the groups became a central theme. The migrant maternal narratives elicited across the study demonstrate the role of the digital in managing the ruptures and connections of migrant motherhood. Mothers, as both consumers and producers of digital information and community, are shown to be working to effect settlement and create belonging for themselves and others.This thesis works to bring mothers out from the shadows of migration and digital social research. In order to achieve the task of making migrant mothers visible, new concepts have been introduced, such as ‘digital community mothering’, ‘relational settlement’, ‘affective settlement’ and ‘migrant maternal imagined communities’. The groups are representations of their collective maternal imaginary, as well as mechanisms for forging ‘real’ connections