Rethinking Visiting Friends and Relatives Mobilities

Abstract The increasing number of people leading more mobile lives, with spatially dispersed families, raises questions over how they maintain their family life and friendships and how this is shaped and shapes different forms of migration and different patterns of visiting friends and relatives (VFR). This paper develops an explanatory framework for conceptualising and analysing VFR mobilities, seeking to draw together threads from migration, mobilities, and tourism studies. In unpacking the notion of VFR, this paper understands VFR mobilities as being constituted of diverse practices and discusses five of the most important of these: social relationships, the provision of care, affirmations of identities and roots, maintenance of territorial rights, and leisure tourism. Although these five types of practices are considered sequentially in this paper, they are in practice often blurred and overlapping. The interweaving of these practices changes over time, as does the meaning and content of individual practices, reflecting changes in the duration of migration, life cycle stage, individual goals and values, and the broader sets of relationships with and social obligations to different kin and friends. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.