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In Search of Citizenship: Affective Modalities of Birth Tourism on the Russian Web

Sun, August 12, 10:30 to 11:30am, Pennsylvania Convention Center, Floor: Level 100, 103B

Abstract

Birth tourism is a vastly understudied social phenomenon: apart from occasional mentions in the news media, this type of reproductive migration is mostly absent from scholarly discourse on population movements. At the same time, new studies draw attention to increasing numbers of expectant parents travelling internationally to have their children born on a foreign soil. Each year, hundreds of Russian speaking families choose the United States as the ultimate parenting destination, sharing their dreams and aspirations of raising future U.S. citizens via online platforms. In this context, online spaces play an important infrastructural role: they foster reproductive migration by facilitating the emergence of multi-participant discourses among expectant parents. Zooming in on the singular experiences of birth tourists, however, we discover that information is not the only currency that circulates on those online hubs. Exploring the birth tourism community on the Russian Web, the paper foregrounds the ways, in which these emergent “spaces in the making” generate and circulate affect by invoking the national American imageries, encouraging users to “provide a better future” for their children. This study presents interdisciplinary work at the intersection of sociology, internet studies, and geography, to explore affective modalities of birth tourism on the Russian Web.

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