When a Child Dies Abroad: A Mother's Reflections on the Bureaucracy of Transnational Loss

Key Points

• This reflection aims to explore how bureaucracy impacts families experiencing transnational child loss, particularly through the lens of the author's own experience.
• Auto-ethnographic analysis of personal experiences following a child's death abroad.
• Engagement with concepts like biopower and necropolitics to assess institutional responses.
• Examination of medical and legal systems to highlight bureaucratic challenges faced by migrant families.
• Identified the ways institutional actors exert control during vulnerable times, creating a sense of administrative violence.
• Illustrated the intertwining of grief with bureaucratic processes, complicating the mourning experience.
• Challenged existing paradigms of authority in humanitarian contexts regarding parental loss.