Between Obligation and Autonomy: Fieldwork Impression from South Asian Migrant Families in UK and France by Zaman MUHAMMAD

In this talk, Pr. Zaman Muhammad will present fieldwork based insights drawn from his MaCI Senior Fellowship project on marriage, migration and kinship among South Asian diasporas in the UK and France. Rather than offering a purely conceptual overview, this session will foreground ethnographic impressions, encounters, and narratives emerging from interactions with migrant parents and second generation youth.I will focus on how marriage decisions (particularly cousin, arranged and early marriage) are emotionally negotiated within families living in different legal and cultural regimes. 

This presentation will highlight everyday moments from fieldwork: conversations in family home, silences during interviews, digitally mediated negotiations through WhatsApp and matrimonial platforms and the contrasting ways young people articulate choices, love, obligation, guilt, care, resistance and/ or aspiration. A comparative dimension will run throughout the talk, showing how similar family practices are experienced differently in UK’s multicultural context and France’s secular republican setting. The aim is to show how migration reshapes marriage not simply as a social institution but as an emotional and intergenerational process lived under conditions of legal scrutiny, cultural translation and digital mediation.My presentation will conclude with a brief reflection on methodological challenges and possibilities, particularly the value of emotional ethnography and fieldwork impressions for understanding migrant family life beyond policy driven or normative framework.